Anthropology and Environment Society

Oral Presentation Session

The urgency of infrastructure: facing climate disaster in the Peruvian Andes

Presenter(s)

• 

  Noah Walker-Crawford

  University of Manchester

In the Peruvian Andes, climate change stokes fear of disaster. Above the city of Huaraz, glacial retreat has caused a mountain lake to grow dramatically and threaten a deadly flood. Government authorities built a dam in the 1970s, but fear this is no longer sufficient, and plan to build a larger one. Authorities assert that this infrastructure is necessary to prevent disaster in the short term.

This lake and dam have also become the subject of a legal dispute. An Andean farmer whose house lies below the lake sued the German energy giant RWE over its contribution to climate change. In a lawsuit that could set a significant precedent for climate liability, the farmer demands that RWE take responsibility for its greenhouse gas emissions and contribute to costs for flood prevention infrastructure. Like Peruvian authorities, the plaintiff’s lawyers at the German court argue that infrastructure is necessary to counter the risk of flooding, framing the issue in terms of global climate change.

Flood safety infrastructure takes center stage in disputes over climate change in the Peruvian Andes and German courts. In the face of climate disaster, infrastructure serves as a vehicle to address both immediate danger and broad claims about historical responsibility. Through an ethnographic study of lake safety works in Peru and legal processes in Germany, I show that authorities’ and lawyers’ demands for infrastructure evoke varying notions of concern in the short and long term. Accordingly, temporality arises as a key issue at stake in the changing climate.