In a recent viewpoint published in Nature Climate Change, six researchers from South America, Asia and Africa examine how glacier retreat in the Andes, Himalayas and other high-altitude regions is reshaping the cultural and spiritual life of different glacial communities. According to the article, local communities see melting glaciers as signs of moral imbalance, punishment or fading protection from ancestors and deities.
A number of these high-altitude communities—some Indigenous, others not—connect the shifts in climate with their own actions, rather than with the industrial economies that are rapidly accelerating climate change.
Examples from Bolivia, Peru and Nepal show how disappearing ice affects rituals, pilgrimages and tourism, while also disrupting water supplies. The authors argue that climate policy should account for cultural and spiritual loss, with Indigenous communities central to defining climate solutions.
The findings illustrate that these diverse communities also share belief systems that are inherently interconnected with the landscapes in which they are rooted. When these landscapes change, so do people’s spiritual connection with the natural world. Often, particularly in Indigenous regions of the Andes and Himalayas, landscape changes are interpreted as punishments.
Bolivia’s Chacaltaya glacier disappeared in 2009, six years earlier than scientists had predicted. According to Elizabeth Allison, an author of the study and professor of ecology and religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, this loss was multifaceted. It took a toll on regional water supplies and the capacity of reservoirs of two nearby cities, La Paz and El Alto, serving as a dramatic sign of the ecological consequences of global warming in Bolivia. It also signaled a troubling change to the region’s Indigenous people. They interpret alterations in the glaciers as reflections on the evolving nature of their moral relationships with the deities presiding over their community, often understanding glacial change as a sign that their gods are turning away from them.
The Milluni Valley in Bolivia, home to the now-vanished Chacaltaya, sits nearly 14,000 feet above sea level and still houses about 12 other glaciers. For the valley’s Indigenous inhabitants, the Aymara people, these glaciers serve as ancestors and protectors. Allison argues that the Aymara people interpret the melting of the glaciers as a weakening of their ancestors’ protective power. She reports that one of the Indigenous community members described these changes as a form of punishment for an increasing lack of regard towards the environment within their community. Allison’s source speaks in particular of an overuse of plastic by community members, and a failure to properly conserve the community’s trees.
The internalization of these environmental changes has the capacity to fundamentally disrupt Indigenous relationships with the land around them because local glacier disappearances destabilize well-established cosmological orders. As Allison notes, glaciers have served as sites upon which to ground “people in the rhythms and cycles of the ecosphere and … [to lose them] would be a cultural and ecological tragedy.”
It is the communities least responsible for causing such changes that often bear the greatest moral burden.
Further north, in the Peruvian Andes, glaciers that have served as the sites of Indigenous pilgrimage for centuries are disappearing at alarming rates. Glacier melt is altering both the kinship between Indigenous communities and their gods, and the pilgrimage through which this kinship is expressed.
The pilgrimage to the Qulqipunku glacier in southern Peru for the festivity of the Lord of the Star of Snow, undertaken by Quechua speakers across the region every year, is the largest Indigenous pilgrimage in the Western Hemisphere. Yet, as the glacier melts, the nature of the pilgrimage is changing. Indigenous pilgrims once retrieved ice from the glacier and carried it home to substantiate a link with their ancestors and guardians. The act of carrying the ice demonstrated their devotion towards the gods but also served the pilgrims, who retained the melted ice for its medicinal properties. Now, as archaeologist and anthropologist Constanza Ceruti writes, Indigenous Andean pilgrims “refrain from collecting large chunks of ice, and choose to carry snowmelt water instead” to adapt to the new glacial conditions.
Ceruti further notes that “it is locally believed that the receding glaciers are a consequence of the mountain spirit attempting to ‘hide’ from the view of his devotees, tired of listening to their many prayers.” As these alpine glaciers melt, the cosmological belief systems that are oriented around them are permanently altered too. Indigenous people feel the need to adapt to their rituals and behavior to these glacial changes.
Talita André, a student in the M.A. in Climate and Society at the Columbia Climate School, explained to GlacierHub: “Climate change is often framed as a technical problem to be solved.” She underscored a contrast with Indigenous communities in places like the Andes, where “environmental loss is not only about biodiversity, carbon stocks or ecosystem services. It also involves the disruption of sacred relationships, ancestral memory, spiritual practices and ways of belonging to a territory.” She described these as “lived experiences that cannot be easily captured through conventional metrics.”
In Nepal, the effects of tourism further compound complicated dynamics of religious belief and climate change. In the Gokyo Valley next to the Ngozumpa glacier, where the tourist industry continues to grow, local villagers’ desires to economically develop the landscape have begun to clash with long-held ancestral beliefs. While the Ngozumpa glacier itself holds no immense spiritual significance, the Gokyo lake, fed by the Ngozumpa glacier, is considered to be the home of a deity.
Pasang Yangjee Sherpa, an assistant professor in the University of British Columbia’s Department of Asian Studies and one of the Indigenous contributors to the article writes, the lake’s “presence … could be felt through the stories and the interpretations of signs that were shared with us by our hosts. It was hard not to feel the sacredness of this place.” Sherpa’s conversations with locals were grounded within a spiritual respect for the deity as opposed to direct concern for the glacial landscape.
For community members, moral evaluations of the tourism industry are considered through the lens of what is, and is not, spiritually respectful. Swimming in the lake, for instance, is considered disrespectful to the deity. While the locals do not view the changes in glacial state as related to their connection with the Gokyo Lake deity, they still measure morally permissible acts by what the deity demands of them and of tourists.
From the Andes to the Himalayas, glaciers provide a common thread among diverse local communities and Indigenous people, both physically and spiritually. However, the increasing speed at which glaciers are disappearing poses a problem for the belief systems vested within these glacial landscapes, which took millennia to form and are now transforming in mere decades. This reckoning sits unsteadily against a broader truth: it is the communities least responsible for causing such changes that often bear the greatest moral burden.
As glaciers continue to melt, the sacred frameworks that have grounded these communities for centuries are put under immense pressure. A solution, as André described, could be to reorient international climate policy around “forms of value that are not easily quantifiable, such as cultural, spiritual and place-based relationships,” focusing on “Indigenous peoples as central actors in defining what loss, repair and climate solutions actually mean.”
