An old wish of the large transnational mining companies is set to come true this Argentine summer. Yesterday the national government presented a draft amendment to Law No. 26,639, known as the “National Glacier Law”, which has already entered the Senate and is expected to be approved in extraordinary sessions in the summer. The aim of the initiative is to abolish the minimum budget that today protects the glaciers and the periglacial environment, Argentina’s most important strategic water reserves.
As expected, and as has been the practice since this Government took office, the reform represents a very serious and unacceptable setback in water conservation given the climate crisis, accelerating glacier retreat and increasing water scarcity across the country.
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The government sent the draft to reform the Glacier Act to Congress
The government project introduces structural changes that completely change the letter and spirit of the current law. First, All glaciers could be destroyed. Why can this happen? The reform will abolish the automatic protection that the law currently provides and replace it with a discretionary system. With a simple declaration from a provincial authority, a glacier can remain outside legal protection and open to mining activities..
Secondly, the project also lifts the explicit ban on mining in the periglacial environment. The current Glacier Law recognizes that glaciers and periglaciers form a unique system that is essential for water regulation. Removing protection from the periglacial means, in effect, allowing the destruction of the glacier. In the periglacial environment there are not only glaciers that we cannot see with the naked eye (rock glaciers), but also frozen soils or permafrost that regulate water and whose importance is crucial in times of climate change and water scarcity. Interfering with periglacial areas where frozen water is present at the surface or at depth would mean losing ice that will never recover and altering processes that maintain basin flow.. That’s why the current law prohibits activities there: because the damage would be irreversible. Outside these areas, Law 26.639 is not the instrument that regulates what activities can be carried out or how they should be carried out.
Greenpeace warned of possible changes to the glacier law: “It is a direct attack on Argentinians’ water”
Twelve Argentine provinces have glaciers on their territory: Jujuy, Salta, Tucumán, Catamarca, La Rioja, San Juan, Mendoza, Neuquén, Río Negro, Chubut, Santa Cruz and Tierra del Fuego. According to the National Glacier Inventory published in 2018 by IANIGLIA (Argentine Institute of Nivology, Glaciology and Environmental Sciences), the 5,769 km² of inventoried Andean glaciers (i.e. excluding Georgias and Sandwich) represent 0.21% of Argentina’s total territory in the Americas. Added to this is the large area of periglacial environment that meets the definition of the law and includes not only rock glaciers but also permafrost (frozen ground). But the ambition of the big mining companies puts no limits on their insatiable approach to extracting the minerals beneath these geoforms, regardless of the devastating and irreversible consequences for the population and ecosystems.
The aim of the Glacier Protection Act, passed in 2010, is to protect waters that represent an ecological and functional unit of interprovincial character and therefore do not belong to a single provincial jurisdiction. Therefore, invoking “federalism” is a mistake that can cost us dearly. Water originates in a province, crosses its territory and continues its course through one or more provinces, irrigating fields and cities and thus supplying different population groups. Since these are interprovincial basins, it is also the responsibility of the national state to be the guarantor of the basin unity, since any legal action or decision in water management affects all areas of the different provinces through which they flow. The aim is therefore to create the best instrument for an efficient and sustainable use of a scarce and vulnerable resource and to ensure solidarity between the different provinces based on a concept of national territory. This means that the provinces cannot exclusively and at their own discretion dispose of inter-jurisdictional water resources, since water basins do not allow exclusive provincial powers and therefore it is the responsibility of the entire nation and people of Argentina.
In 2025, the International Year of Glacier Protection, the national government intends to amend the national glacier law to allow provinces to make changes to their own taste, following the direction of the mining lobby. The aim is to undermine the existing legal framework by relying on false federalism in order to expand the mining area. Changing the Glacier Act in this way is ecologically risky and legally illegal. The project violates the principle of environmental non-regression, recognized in the National Constitution and the Escazú Convention (Law 27.566), which prohibits any reduction in the level of protection already achieved. Instead of strengthening water protection in the face of the climate crisis, the government wants to weaken the only regulation that sets a clear limit to the advance of mega-mining in the headwaters of the rivers.
Once a glacier is destroyed, there is no way to rebuild it. His destruction is forever. Therefore, more than ever, we must invoke a fundamental principle that transcends elections and political identity: protecting glaciers and the periglacial environment means protecting water, watersheds and the future of the entire nation; In short, it protects lives. We call on citizens, social organizations, communities, journalists and legislators to defend the Glacier Law in its current form without changes and to prevent setbacks in the protection of Argentina’s strategic water reserves.
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