DOWNSTREAM: Produced by Protect Our Winters

Glaciers are very important locally for the biodiversity and outdoor activities but they are also important very far away because they feed glacier-fed rivers all the way to the sea or the ocean and they serve as habitat for thousands of species including humans. We are using the water coming from glaciers and snow for everyday life we will lose everything if we don't protect glaciers. My name is Juliette Becker, I realised a PhD about the impact of hydrological alterations on aquatic biodiversity in mountain streams. I am a ski instructor, I come from here, I was at high school here and it's my home. When you live close to the mountain you really can see that there is less and less snow, you can see that glaciers are melting, that the mountain is looking different but I don't think that when you live far away from the mountains you can imagine how much dependent on snow and glaciers you are. Hundreds of millions of people rely on glaciers for their water. The objective of the project was to raise awareness among the general public and the outdoor community about the impacts of glacier melting linked to climate change on everything downstream. We focused on three different studies sites, the Rhone river that starts in Switzerland and flows to France and to the Mediterranean Sea, the Columbia river which flows through Canada and the United States and finally the Waitaki river in New Zealand. This is a quite complex watershed. We travelled along the three rivers, we met some amazing people, some scientists, some experts, some athletes. My parents taught me skiing since two years old. They brought me here when I was 13. They bring me to the Vallée Blanche, it is a long way down skiing from the Aiguille du Midi. So we skied all the way until here. It's really impressive the changes since I was 13. I don't know if it's because I was just a child, I wasn't afraid. When I went a few days ago I was quite scared to be honest because it was very steep, it was grey with big crevices. I didn't remember it was like this. With climate change and with increasing temperatures, permafrost is melting. Here for example some rocks, blue snow, that probably come from the cliffs. I can't imagine Chamonix without glaciers, without ice. It is our identity. Glaciers are our best indicator in Aotearoa of climate change. The recession we've seen over the last 150 years is such a wake-up call to what's going on. It's massive, particularly the last few decades. In my lifetime the loss of ice is just phenomenal. We should be telling the stories about what these glaciers are showing us all the time to people. With the climate change taking hold, glaciers are retreating very rapidly worldwide. A new study estimated that at the global scale between 20 and 50 percent of the glacier loss at the end of the century. This will have big impact for water resources, for biodiversity, but also for human activities. Climate change is obviously causing the glaciers to retreat and that's a direct result of warming temperatures. The other big things that are going on here are changes in rainfall patterns. We're getting a lot drier summers, but we're also getting more extreme storm events. This last summer is the second driest summer in the last 100 years. When I first came here in the 1970s there wasn't a massive big lake here then. The glacier came right down here and it's gone back hugely in that time. But it's not only the glaciers have gone back, they've dropped down, they've become a lot lower. We're also seeing less snowfall and that's going to change the dynamics of the rivers further downstream. Rivers are really important to people that were here before Europeans arrived. Rich food resources, there's fishing out at sea, fishing in the river, there's bird life here, they were travel corridors, they were critical for Maori people as well. The biggest problem that people downstream will face with changing snow cover regimes is that the snow melt will come earlier and it will come in smaller amounts, so they will be missing this water later in the season. This has impacts for both agriculture, hydropower, but it will also affect stream temperatures. There is now information from measurement stations that dates back quite a few years. It is very evident that snow regimes are changing. We tend to have shorter snow durations, earlier snow melt, more precipitation occurring as rain also during winter. Snow that accumulates during winter is what feeds the glaciers. If you have less snow in winter or snow melting earlier, a bigger part of the glacier will become snow-free earlier and ice is darker than snow. Ice absorbs more solar radiation and melts faster. You can think of snow as a water reservoir. With increasing temperatures this reservoir is just melted earlier, so we will have maybe more water earlier in spring, but this water will be missing later. It's important in the European Alps, but then you have other regions in the world where it's even crazier. In the Himalayas and in the Western US, all of the precipitation happens in winter, so the snowpack that they accumulate in the mountains in winter determines everything that happens in summer. More and more alpine rivers are warming and that can have an impact on the species living on the river. Here we have a big-sized specimen. This one is probably an ephemera, and these two are phacoptera. It's quite rare to see such a big invertebrate in that type of place for a river. Microinvertebrates are important for fish populations. Warming temperatures of the rivers are leading to the life cycle changes, which is in turn impacting fish. The Snake River runs through Jackson Hole and nobody knows what bugs live there. Without the insects you don't have the fish, and the warmer the water gets, you know, the more turbid it gets, the less dissolved oxygen it has, the less likely those insects are to survive. We're seeing that more and more hatch times changing. You're going to start seeing these life cycles go faster and faster and faster. You might be like, wow, there's way more bugs here, but when that life cycle speeds up and goes faster and faster, the insects are emerging maybe at a little bit smaller size, and if they're a little smaller size, they're probably holding less eggs, and when they're laying less eggs, all of a sudden, over time, that's going to lead to a population demise and collapse. Salmon and steelhead that come to Idaho pretty incredibly still have access to this huge complex of wild, intact habitat. It's at a high elevation, so that means it'll be well insulated from climate change as river systems in lower elevation warm. It's wilderness protected, it's largely roadless, so if salmon were to be doing well anywhere, they should be doing well here, but the fact of the matter is that they're not, and it's primarily due to their migration experience through eight dams on the Snake and Columbia Rivers. Salmon have to pass these eight dams as juveniles going out to the ocean, and several years later, as adults coming back up river. Our wild fish are still on a trajectory toward extinction, and so what the science has shown is that it really will take dam removal on the lower snake to improve that migration experience for salmon, and hopefully recover their populations to healthy and harvestable abundance again. I think it's important to acknowledge that in the 1990s, the first salmon species that returns to the Snake River, that species was listed thanks to the efforts of the Shoshone-Bannock tribes. Now there is movement regionally from tribes like the Nez Perce, the Warm Springs, the Umatilla, the Yakama, important tribes regionally that have these treaty-held rights that haven't been fulfilled by the federal government. Hydroelectricity is a really important renewable resource, but it is a conundrum in the sense that every time you build a dam, you modify and affect quite dramatically the whole flow cycle of the river. The water system is really supported by snowmelt, and timing of that snowmelt is everything, and snowpack is melting quicker and earlier, leaving our rivers at a lower level and more prone to temperature increases in the summer. Hydropower generation isn't as reliable as it once was, because it's relying on this water tower system that really isn't what it was 10, 20 years ago. I discovered the Karmak landscapes, which are very flat lands, 800 kilometers away from the Rhone glaciers. In Karmak, they are facing issues about salt, because the sea level is rising, and also the decreasing flows of the Rhone River, linked to decreasing snowfall and glacial retreat. Both are leading to a higher salt concentration in the soil. They need to keep water in their field to prevent salt rising. The water will come in, and we will maintain a very light level of water, just to prevent salt from rising. You have the sea, you have the Bacchares, and you have the salt. Geologically, I don't know how it happens, but there must be cavities in the soil, veins that follow the water. The salt water fills up, fills up, fills up, it withdraws, the salt remains, and you end up with pockets of salt. Sometimes in the soil, from one day to the next, you have a hole, it's not an opening that shows. When the salt rises, nothing grows, it's burnt. It starts like that, the rise of the salt. Today it's okay, we have enough water, but in 20 years, I don't know. Didier is an agronomy engineer, really interested in irrigation technologies. Véronique is much more interested in how to make the wine, and together they have complementary approaches, using the principle of biodynamics, which considers the farmland as an entire ecosystem. They are facing more and more extreme meteorological events. There is already, at the bottom of the glaciers, we will have a decrease in water resources. Until now, people, the water has flowed from sources, we must share the water. In fact, we are trying to adapt, really find the suitable crop for the place, but with global warming, I still ask myself, I question myself about the relevance of certain crops. On the bottom of the glaciers too, is it that in the future, maybe on the bottom of the glaciers, it's going to get too hot, don't we want to grow again? On the top of the vineyards, certain crops, yeah, I think it's a question, but it's going pretty fast. To face climate change, we will need citizens, we will need public services, states and politics, and we also need business world. It's the choices that each company makes, the type of materials that they're sourcing, that impacts the environment. If they make responsible choices from the beginning, if they put environmental philosophy before business, we cannot forget that, we cannot do business in a world that is in shambles. The impact that we have on the planet, we are responsible for it. In the Waitaki catchment, we met two farmers producing merino wool. They are practicing the regenerative agriculture. It's a way to be less vulnerable to extreme meteorological events. How we farm and how we live is authentic to our morals. The soil, the animals, us, we're all interconnected. We have predominantly merino sheep and farming for their wool. It's very visual what's happening above ground, but to look underground, there's a lot of information of what's going on. As they say, there's more livestock under the ground, and we're actually farming those livestock as well. Region Act is a set of farm practices that are aimed to improve the health of the soil, improve the waterways, to increase biodiversity. At the end of the day, to improve the environment. If the soil is in good condition, then in turn, water can be absorbed and held by the soil. And in this steep country next to a water body, it doesn't run off carrying soil with it. The water isn't in a healthy way. That's me being really honest. They've interfered with nature here. Every time there's a water event, there's more and more silting at the top because of the braided rubber. And so there's too much soil entering into this damned rubber. Poor soil leads to poor plant growth, leads to poor stock. So without good soils and healthy soils, we don't have anything. The whole system will collapse. When you use the environment as a playground, you are facing these changes. I've never seen something so beautiful, like the pink sun onto the glacier. I mean, it's crazy. We could see the flat valley and many things with water stored as ice and snow. They're really important. And from there, we can see each mountain as a water tower. As a scientist, it is scary because of the amount of water downstream, which will drastically decrease, especially in summer. This is a huge watershed. Throughout my childhood, I've paddled on all of the tributaries. My parents used to take me on rafting trips in the Salmon River when I was a kid. It's very beautiful how much it provides to so many people. I've noticed changes in the sense of our water resources used to be a little bit more dependent. We are trying to raise the next generation of stewards on the river and people who care about and want to protect this resource. And I think it's cool seeing kids who are as young as nine years old have this incredible passion. It's going to bring them a lot of places, make them want to protect this resource that's given them valuable life experience when they're very young. The good news with climate change is we know exactly what it is. The main impactful thing that we can do is consume less. Individually, everyone can try to adapt their lifestyle and reduce their own consumption. But the problem needs to be tackled at a larger scale. And so we need to encourage politicians that are brave to take drastic measures. Ten percent of the world's population, the richest ten percent, which is all of us here in countries like New Zealand, are producing half of the greenhouse gas emissions. We've got to cut them down. We've got to be doing it now, not next week or next year or after the next election. We've got to be doing that today. But then we've got to deal with what's already in the atmosphere. Those greenhouse gases are changing our climate today. Even if we reduce all of our emissions right away, we're still going to have climate change for decades to come. So we've therefore got to think about how can we build resilience into our landscapes, into our communities to try and withstand the impacts of the extreme storm events we're getting. It needs brave solutions and I think it also needs the acceptance that our current lifestyle is not compatible. There is a very large cohort of young environmentalists who are looking to instill changes that protect this resource that we have. If you want to look to the answers, look to nature and she'll tell you. I think we have a responsibility, a massive responsibility, to be educating, to be sharing that information because it's a crisis we're facing. Whoever you are, if you are an athlete, if you are a scientist, a farmer, a user of water, glacier melting will impact your everyday life. You have to be aware about how glacier melt is impacting the river downstream.