Luis Fernando Pumuy turns on the spigot outside of his house and splashes water onto most of his body, trying to cool off from the unrelenting heat in the Indigenous community of Asunción del Quiquibey, where the Mosetén and Tsimané ethnic groups both live. Even though the water now flows out of the spigot with plenty of pressure, rainfall in this community is often only a fleeting joy. Water is commonly scarce in many Indigenous communities in the Amazon due to droughts. When the rain returns, floods cause additional suffering. These Amazonian Indigenous communities flip back and forth between these two extremes: The droughts make it difficult to find water to survive, but flooding from periods of heavy rain can threaten many modest homes. When water is scarce or contaminated, or when people have unequal or no access to it, tensions can increase between communities or countries. For this reason, the theme that the United Nations established for World Water Day 2024 (March 22) was “Water for Peace.” “When we cooperate on water, we create a positive ripple effect — fostering harmony, generating prosperity and building resilience to shared challenges,” said the United Nations in a statement. The residents of Asunción del Quiquibey have come to understand this very well. For many years, the community has suffered due to the difficulty of adapting to the unpredictable behavior of water in the environment. The town has needed to move its location on four occasions due to the Quiquibey River’s continual flooding,…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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