The Parana river is seeing historic lows
The Parana, South America’s second-largest river behind only the Amazon, has retreated this year to its lowest level since its record low in 1944, hit by cyclical droughts and dwindling rainfall upriver in Brazil. Climate change threatens to worsen those trends.
The decline of the waterway, which knits together a huge swathe of the continent, has hurt river communities, snarled grains transport in Argentina and Paraguay and contributed to a rise in wildfires, damaging wetland ecosystems.
“This is historic. I’ve never seen it so low in my lifetime,” said Gustavo Alcides Diaz, an Argentine fisherman and hunter from a river island community in Charigue, some 300 kilometers (186 miles) upriver from the Argentine capital Buenos Aires, lamenting the impact on fish stocks and fresh water.
The Parana’s crisis is among the multitude of woes arising worldwide associated with global climate change linked to the burning of fossil fuels and the resulting greenhouse gas emissions. World leaders are set to meet at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP26, starting on Oct. 31 in Glasgow, Scotland amid warnings from a U.N. panel about climate-related disruptions for decades, if not centuries, to come.
