As a Peruvian farmer pursues a precedent-setting climate justice lawsuit on the global stage, he faces critique and malicious rumours in his own community. While Andean farmers struggle to address the impacts of climate change, some find it hard to identify with global discourses of climate justice.
Paper long abstract:
The Peruvian farmer and mountain guide Saúl Luciano Lliuya is pursuing a precedent-setting climate justice lawsuit against the German energy giant RWE over its contribution to climate change and glacial lake flood risk in the Andes. While the lawsuit has attracted global attention to climate change impacts in Peru, some locals disagree with the framing around flood risk and are critical of Saúl's motives. At an international stage, many see Saúl as a climate justice celebrity who symbolically represents the vulnerable peoples of the world who struggle to engage with the impacts of global warming. Yet in his own village, rumours abound that Saúl is out to get rich rather than help other people. As a shifting and increasingly unpredictable Andean environment leads rural communities to question the prospects of future life, people's understandings of climate change are often ambiguous and contested. Discussions about Saúl's lawsuit bring these difficulties to the fore as people struggle to make sense of why and how the mountains that give them life are changing before their eyes.