Argentina’s President Javier Milei has taken steps to reform the country’s existing glacier protection law. In December, he sent a bill to the National Congress of Argentina that loosens environmental protections and opens the door for further mining and industrial activity in glacial and periglacial landscapes. On February 26, 2026, the Argentine Senate approved the bill, with 40 votes in favor, 31 opposed and one abstention. The other house of congress, the Chamber of Deputies, will discuss the change later this month, where it is likely to receive significant support, though its approval is not guaranteed.
National Law 26.639, the Minimum Standards for the Preservation of Glaciers and the Periglacial Environmental Law, also known as the National Glacier Protection Law, was enacted in 2010. The environmental protection it provided glaciers was unprecedented. The law defined glaciers and periglacial landscapes—areas that undergo freezing and thawing, typically located on the edges of either past or present glaciated regions—as public assets and water reserves. Argentina has around 17,000 glaciers that feed watersheds and river flows. As crucial water reserves, these glaciers support the water supply for millions of Argentinians.
However, despite the introduction of the law, a 2016 government report found 44 mining projects in glacial and periglacial areas. More have likely begun in the decade since. While the National Glacier Protection Law mandated a National Glacier Inventory to track which areas are protected, the inventory has not been sufficiently funded nor maintained to accurately enforce protection.
The bill passed in February amends the National Glacier Protection Law to allow provinces to individually determine which areas are considered glacial or periglacial, potentially undermining the current stricter definition. The reform also places decision-making powers about industrial activity in the hands of provincial governments.
“The law is effective because it uses objective scientific data from the National Glacier Inventory to define protected areas,” said Cristian Fernández, a lecturer at the University of Buenos Aires and the legal coordinator at Fundación Ambiente y Recursos Naturales, an Argentine organization dedicated to environmental protection and human rights.
“[The law] serves as a tool for environmental land-use planning, ensuring that industrial development does not occur in areas where damage to the water cycle would be permanent and irreversible,” he said. By shifting away from national standards and toward provincial power, these important guardrails can be determined based on political convenience rather than collective environmental rights.
“Laws that establish science-based, nationwide minimum standards for the protection of strategic water reserves play an important role in ensuring legal certainty and safeguarding ecosystems in a warming climate,” said Maria Antonia Tigre, director of global climate litigation at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, which is part of the Columbia Climate School. “Any effort to weaken or fragment those protections warrants careful scrutiny.”
“By making the law ‘interpretative,’ the government seeks to retroactively validate mining projects that were previously in violation of the law, essentially acting as if the original protections never existed,” Fernández explained. It creates the potential for scientifically proven ice body water reserves to be removed from the National Inventory.
The reform comes during a period of economic challenges. Since the start of this century, Argentina has battled with high inflation rates, seeing a spike in 2024. Over the past year, through a number of economic policies under Milei, inflation has retreated from that spike, but economic issues remain a major concern, fueling the push for industrial activities such as mining that could promote growth.
“Now that inflation has been tamed, the main economic issues [in Argentina] are jobs and poverty…This makes economic growth a priority for the government,” said Maria Victoria Murillo, a professor of political science and international and public affairs at Columbia University and the director of the Institute for Latin American Studies. “The government wants mineral exports to both foster growth and provide access to foreign exchange.”
Murillo explained that many provinces of the Andean region believe mining holds potential for economic growth. She added that mining is more capital than labor intensive and as such is not likely to create many jobs. “Yet, the jobs created will be concentrated geographically in those Andean provinces,” she continued. And the, “new investment regime is very favorable to corporations.” Mining is very water intensive, and protecting glacial environments limits access to water use for mining. Economic pressures, combined with the new power provinces will hold under these new reforms, leaves glacial environments vulnerable to industrial activity.
“Before its enactment in 2010, glaciers were only protected if they fell within National Parks, leaving most of these ecosystems—which hold 70 percent of the country’s fresh water—vulnerable to climate change and industrial activities,” explained Fernández. By defining them as public assets, the National Glacier Protection Law was intended to safeguard present and future water security in the face of environmental impact and global climate change. Argentina was the first country to pass such a law, and now it is under direct attack.
Fernández warns that, “the reform proposed by the current administration sets a negative and dangerous precedent for Argentinian environmental policy.” Although glacier loss is a global issue, responses are often set at the national level. Glacier protection is therefore at the mercy of political pendulums. In a battle with economic pressures, environmental laws are subject to reversals. The recent vote in Argentina, which weakened a law once considered among the strongest glacier protection systems in the world, demonstrates just that.
