The puna resists climate change: Peruvian families who protect wetlands and alpacas in increasingly hostile habitats

At five in the afternoon, when the sun begins to hide behind the apus and the cold once again takes possession of the puna, hundreds of alpacas make their way back to their pens, avoiding the frozen puddles that cover the landscape. Several women usually observe them carefully. They make sure that no one is left behind. Furthermore, before nightfall, they delicately check that none of these camelids presents signs of pneumonia or diarrhea, increasingly frequent due to the harsh frosts that climate change has brought with it. Then it’s time to save energy and prepare for the next day’s work: clean the canals that feed the wetland, fertilize each path as if it were about preserving the future.

At more than 4,300 meters above sea level, in Chalhuanca, province of Caylloma (Arequipa), this routine has been repeated for several generations. However, today it has a new face. While many men in the community migrate to mining or other activities in search of higher income, it is the women who remain in the countryside and maintain the daily work that keeps the alpacas, pastures and wetlands alive.

“We women have had to take charge in the field because many of the men in the community have left the town to go work in other things, like the mines,” says Victoria Vilca, alpaca breeder. “Now we are in charge of protecting the wetlands, of giving life to the dry land through fertilizer and also of an ancient activity known as Oq’o Karpay, which consists of opening a path for water to moisten the wetlands and maintain them,” he adds.

His testimony summarizes a silent change that goes through life in the puna. If before responsibilities were shared between men and women, today around 80% of the daily work on the ranches falls on them. They are the ones who herd the alpacas before dawn, lead them back to the corral at dusk, monitor the condition of the calves, clean the water channels, fertilize the pastures and face a climate that no longer behaves as it did just a few decades ago.

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At first glance, a wetland looks like an extensive green carpet that breaks the monotony of the dry puna. However, for those who live here, it is much more than a high Andean wetland. It is the heart of the ecosystem.

“The wetland is like a water mattress,” explains Walter Vilca, representative of the Chalhuanca alpaca family. “It stores water throughout the year and gradually releases it into the river. Thanks to that we have permanent grass. That is the difference with dry land, where grass only appears when it rains.”

In a region where rainfall is increasingly unpredictable, the wetlands become the guarantee of food for the alpacas during the twelve months of the year. But preserving them is far from a natural process. It requires constant work.

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Every week the families clean the canals through which the water circulates, remove the vegetation that obstructs its passage, repair intakes and perform Oq’o Karpay, an ancestral practice that distributes water evenly to prevent some areas from drying out while others become saturated.

“The work is almost daily,” says Walter, pointing to a network of small hand-opened canals. “We have to repair the wetlands permanently because the vegetation grows and blocks the passage of water. If we stop doing so, the wetland stops working.”

Conservation also happens underground. Families use the manure from the alpacas themselves to fertilize the soil in different ways: moving it in wheelbarrows, rotating the pens so that the animals fertilize new areas or distributing it manually over the pastures. Everything responds to knowledge accumulated over generations that seeks to keep alive an ecosystem on which the entire production chain depends.

“Before, the extreme cold began between June and July,” says Victoria Vilca. “Now we have had frost since March.” The change may seem small to someone who lives in the city, but in the puna it means additional months of low temperatures and a greater risk for newborn alpacas. Respiratory and digestive diseases are becoming more common.

But this alteration does not only affect animals. It also forces us to rethink the way in which communities manage the territory.

“Climate change has modified the ecosystem and, therefore, it has also affected the way in which people manage their space,” explains Edgardo Cruzado, manager of the Puna Contestable Fund, from Profonanpe. “Alpacas have modified their way of living because the ecosystem changed. This implies that communities have to learn new ways of management, combining the knowledge they already had with specialized information,” he reinforces.

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Far from replacing ancestral knowledge, the objective is to strengthen it. Technical teams work together with the communities to identify native plant species, evaluate their medicinal usefulness and monitor the behavior of water in the wetlands through study plots and satellite photographs. The information obtained allows us to measure which practices work best and how to adapt them to an increasingly uncertain climate.

Along these lines, the Puna Resiliente 2025 Competitive Fund is especially relevant, through which the communities of Chalhuanca and Colca Camel stand out as winners. From this, they will receive financing for improvements in their processes, as well as training and technical assistance. This reaches its entire production chain, which does not end in the field, but is repowered with the shearing of the world-admired camelid.

Twice a year, between March and December, the community participates in one of the most important activities on the calendar: shearing. On those days, neighbors and entire families gather to carefully remove the fiber from the animals, a process that requires skill to avoid harming the alpacas and preserving the quality of one of the finest natural fibers in the world.

“Our work does not end in the field, but continues throughout the chain,” explains Edith Cayllahua, president of the Joyas del Colca association. “Then we help with the collection of the fiber and its classification according to quality: fine, superfine and other categories. In addition, with part of that fiber we have trained ourselves to make threads and crafts such as bags, gloves, sweaters and hats,” adds Cayllahua.

Learning to spin and make garments not only opens up new income possibilities: it also allows part of the work to remain in the territory and not end up solely in the textile industry.

Thus, everything acts as a perfect circle. It begins when someone cleans a canal so that the water continues to flow with the ancient Oq’o Karpay. It continues when another person distributes the alpaca manure to recover the grass. Continue caring for a sick calf during a frosty morning. Then comes the shearing, the gathering, the classification and, finally, the hands that turn that fiber into a thread or a garment. Each link depends on the previous one. Therefore, talking about an alpaca in the puna is also talking about water, wetlands and, of course, the people who protect them, as protagonists of this story as the fiber that continues to amaze the world today. //