2026-05-272026-05-27https://cris.inaigem.gob.pe/handle/123456789/1052Peruvian glaciers sustain key sectors of the country’s economy and population livelihood, as well as unique nearby ecosystems. They represent the largest tropical ice mass on Earth, controlled by a climate with minimal temperature seasonality, alternating dry and wet seasons, and episodic, ephemeral snow that is nonetheless sufficient to insulate glacier surfaces. Complex wetland ecosystems are closely connected to the glaciers, and fed by a combination of glacier melt water, rain and groundwater. Located downvalley, peatland and wet meadows called “bofedales'' form patches that change spatially and seasonally, and provide key ecosystem services such as carbon and water storage, nutrient filtration and biomass production, as well as pasture for grazing animals. Communities in the Cordilleran highlands struggle to maintain their traditional lifestyle in the face of urbanisation, rural-urban migration, industrialisation and ever-increasing large-scale agriculture. High mountain communities are highly vulnerable, disproportionately affected by poverty, inequality and marginalisation, and severely impacted by water scarcity. Local subsistence agriculture (mostly potatoes, barley and wheat) is increasingly threatened by the combination of climatic, glacier, and societal change, with water allocation imperilled by shrinking glaciers and growing pressure from users. A clear competition is in place between preservation of the local ecosystems, with their important role as buffers to runoff variations, and subsistence agriculture and animal farming. Increasing evidence suggests that catchment runoff is declining due to dwindling glacier water supplies, and peak water might have passed already. In summary, the high mountain catchments of the Andes Cordillera are home to a unique combination of tropical glaciers that might have passed already or are very close to a tipping point, rare ecosystems and an important subsistence agriculture that supports vulnerable local communities. The main goal of this project is to provide a holistic and novel understanding of past decadal changes in glaciers and snow in the Peruvian Andes, and their impact on mountain ecosystems and agriculture. Understanding the complex interplays between the cryosphere, biosphere and hydrosphere in the region is extremely challenging, and only a holistic, integrated model can provide simulations of energy, water and carbon fluxes in the complex environments of the Andean Cordillera. We will use a novel high-resolution land surface model that can tackle the complexity of these integrated systems and builds on the most recent scientific advances in cryosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere research, and will apply it for the first time to a highly relevant societal problem of water scarcity and security in the Andes of Peru. The model will be used to simulate catchment response to climate and water-vegetation interactions over the past two decades in the two most glacierised catchments of Peru. It will be forced with high resolution simulations from the WRF climate model and calibrated and validated using data from specific field campaigns and remote sensing of glaciers and ecosystems. The main outcomes will be: i) a new understanding of drivers of changes in climate, glaciers and water in the Andes; ii) quantification of the feedback mechanisms and interactions between glacier and ecosystem change; iii) new simulations of the whole high mountain water cycle including agriculture, and scenarios providing future changes in it that can support actions by stakeholders and policy makers; and finally iv) translation of this novel scientific understanding into social learning and knowledge available to stakeholders.Glacier-ecosystems interactionsHyper-resolution land surface modellingGlacier retreatFuture glacier runoffMountain ecosystemsSubsistence agriculturePeruvian AndesVegetation changeCordillera BlancaEnergy-balance modellingCordillera VilcanotaBlue-green water interactionsWater scarcityCryosphere-hydrosphere-biosphere interactions