Peruvian farmer takes on German coal giant to save his town from a melting glacier

Saúl Luciano Lliuya shudders as he looks up at the endless slabs of ice crushed haphazardly atop each other, towering majestically into the clouds.
Clinging to the flanks of Mount Palcaraju, the glacier has, like most in the Peruvian Andes, been melting rapidly in recent years, its snout retreating further and further up the precipitous expanses of jagged granite.
The influx of meltwater has led Palcacocha, a lake 5,000 feet beneath Palcaraju's summit, to swell to more than 30 times its historic volume. Now more than half-a-mile long and 200 feet deep, the lake contains 600 million cubic feet of water.
'This is not normal,' says Mr Luciano Lliuya, a semi-subsistence farmer and mountain guide, pointing to the vast talus slopes that have opened up between the glacier and the far shore of Palcacocha below. 'The glacier should come all the way down to the lake. This is so dangerous.'
As he talks, the cracking and booming of distant blocks of ice crashing unseen down the mountain rumble through the thin air. The danger Mr Luciano Lliuya is referring to is that a major avalanche could send millions of cubic feet of snow, ice and rock plummeting into the lake.
If that happens, scientists say, it could trigger a surge wave more than 60 feet high – a wave which would not stop at the water's edge, where we are standing, but instead rush down thousands of feet through a narrow mountain gorge.
Eventually, after around 30 minutes, it would slam into Huaraz, capital of the region of Ancash with around 120,000 residents. A bustling market town, Huaraz is also home to a vibrant tourist scene and draws trekkers and climbers from around the world.
That risk, and its possible relationship to climate change, is now at the heart of an unprecedented lawsuit with potentially momentous global repercussions, brought by Mr Luciano Lliuya on the other side of the planet, in Germany.
The case against the coal giant
On May 28, an appeals court in Hamm, in northwestern Germany, will rule on his civil claim against Rheinisch-Westfälisches Elektrizitätswerk (RWE), Germany's largest energy company, which is headquartered nearby. It has been burning coal at its power plants since 1900 and is one of Europe's largest emitters of greenhouse gases.
Using a property law more usually targeted at nuisance neighbours, Mr Luciano Lliuya, supported by German nonprofit Germanwatch, is demanding that RWE pay roughly €17,000 (£14,600) to the Ancash regional government towards building a protective dyke.
That corresponds to 0.47 per cent of the total cost of the dyke. It is based on the plaintiffs' calculation that RWE is responsible for 0.47 per cent of all historical carbon emissions. They argue that 50,000 people, including Mr Luciano Lliuya, live directly in the path of the potential deluge.
Filed in 2015, the case is the most advanced of several dozen similar lawsuits, brought independently in different countries around the world. Each one is being fought tooth and nail by the various corporations alleged to be fuelling climate change.
Arguably the most notable of those is one filed by the city of Honolulu, in Hawaii, against Exxon, Chevron, Shell, BP and other oil majors.
Mr Luciano Lliuya's lawsuit is therefore being watched closely by just about anyone with a stake in global climate politics, from environmental activists pushing the principle of 'the polluter pays' to the world's biggest fossil fuel companies wary of possible legal liability for extreme weather events.
'This case could set a precedent, not a binding one but a symbolic one. It could open up a flood of claims globally,' says Petra Minnerop, a law professor at Durham University, who studies climate change litigation.
'It would show that there's objectively, demonstrably attribution to a specific emitter – that this is not just about climate change generally. In that sense, this case could be very significant.'
Unsurprisingly, RWE disagrees. In a statement, it called Mr Luciano Lliuya's lawsuit 'unfounded,' said there was no risk of Palcacocha overflowing, and stressed that it had 'complied with all applicable public law regulations at all times'.
'It would be an irresolvable contradiction if the state were to regulate CO2 emissions in detail by law on the one hand and at the same time impose civil liability for them retroactively on the other,' it continued. 'Climate targets belong on the political agenda and not in a courtroom.'
Next month, the judges will either accept RWE's arguments and dismiss Mr Luciano Lliuya's claim or proceed to a forensic calculation of the monetary amount to be paid by the company.
A precedent set
The case has revolved around some highly technical details, including, for example, the low angles at which avalanches can be triggered in this part of the Peruvian Andes, thanks, in part, to their tropical latitude.
Among other factors, the court set a timeframe of 30 years for the risk to be litigable. During that period, a court-appointed expert, civil engineer Rolf Katzenbach, calculated the probability of Palcacocha devastating Huaraz at just one per cent.
But scientists advising Germanwatch, including specialists in mountain systems from universities in Switzerland and Austria, put it at 30 per cent and claim that Mr Katzenbach failed to include climate change itself in his calculations. The NGO is now asking the court to recuse Mr Katzenbach.
Possibly readying itself for an adverse result, Germanwatch is already emphasising that, whatever the judges decide on May 28, the fact that the German courts accepted the case and then allowed it to advance for a decade through the legal system is a victory.
That has already established, they say, the principle that industrial-scale carbon emitters can be sued by plaintiffs hurt by global warming far beyond the national boundaries that typically limit legal jurisdiction.
What is indisputable is that deadly avalanches and landslides naturally strike this highly-seismic region.
In 1941, around 1,800 people were killed in Huaraz – then just a tenth of the size it is today – when Palcacocha burst its banks after part of the overhanging glacier collapsed into it.
And in 1970, an earthquake triggered a landslide on Huascaran, Peru's highest peak at just over 22,000 feet, just down the valley from Huaraz. An estimated 25,000 people died – a calamity viscerally stamped into the region's collective memory.
A key question for the court is to what extent climate change elevates these risks? And then, of course, whether the blame should be apportioned to a power company nearly 7,000 miles away?
Peru is actually home to 70 per cent of the world's tropical glaciers, most of them in the Cordillera Blanca (White Range), above Huaraz. Yet they have been disappearing fast. According to the country's National Institute of Research of Mountain Glaciers and Ecosystems, 56 per cent of Peru's glacier cover has disappeared since 1962.
That means that there are, in fact, dozens of other overflowing mountain lakes in the Cordillera Blanca threatening the communities that live below them, although none on the scale of Palcacocha and Huaraz.
Peru's experience of vanishing glaciers matches the global trend. One 2023 study, in Science, found that 104,000 of the world's more than 215,000 mountain glaciers and ice caps, excluding Antarctica and Greenland, will melt away by the end of this century.
'The mountains are changing'
The symptoms of climate change in the high Andes are varied and complex. They include everything from mountain streams tinged red and made toxic by heavy metals from newly exposed rock to riskier climbing conditions as the ice weakens.
The situation is compounded by temperatures rising faster than the global average, says Alton Byers, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who has been studying the Cordillera Blanca since the 1980s.
That is partly due to the albedo effect, with dark rock absorbing more of the sun's energy than the highly-reflective glaciers that once blanketed them.
'The permafrost is weakening. It's the glue that holds the mountain, or its surface, together,' Dr Byers adds. 'That is leading to an increase in avalanches and rockfall.'
Making matters worse, he says, is the fact that under the glaciers, where hard ice once gripped the rock, meltwater increasingly runs. Dr Byers is now warning that, in a worst-case scenario, even Huascaran could eventually end up without snow around a century from now.
For Mr Luciano Lliuya, the danger from Palcacocha is just the most dramatic change he is facing from global warming.
The increasingly dangerous climbing conditions means that he is losing income from his work as a mountain guide. Meanwhile, on his two-acre farm, new pests target his harvests.
His mother could store corn in ceramic pots for three years and potatoes for a year, he says.
Now both just last months, the former consumed by moths and the latter by a fungus. The trout have vanished from the streams and the once-raucous chorus of toads silenced.
'The mountains are changing. Everything is changing,' says Mr Luciano Lliuya. 'This is the most beautiful landscape, with its snow-capped summits, but I worry what will be left for my children.'
For now, the regional government has installed a system of pipes that have lowered Palcacocha by around six feet. But Cesar Portocarrera, a civil engineer and glaciologist based in Huaraz, warns that it needs to be reduced by at least 65 feet to eliminate the risk of catastrophe. It was he who first proposed the dyke, with a channel for the controlled release of excess water.
Whether that dyke is ever built in this high-altitude wilderness in a remote corner of South America – but above all who will pay for it – could have truly global implications. It will not only be Mr Luciano Lliuya and RWE who will be closely following the Hamm court's ruling next month.

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