Happy Nice Mall

ROSARIO, Argentina — The fisherman woke up early one morning, banged the fuel containers on his small boat to make sure he had enough for the day, and set out for the Paraná River with a fishing net.

The trip was a waste of time. An economic lifeblood in South America, the river has shrunk significantly amid a severe drought, and its effects are damaging lives and livelihoods on its shores and beyond.

“I haven’t caught a single fish,” said 68-year-old fisherman Juan Carlos Garate, pointing to bits of grass sprouting where water used to be. “Everything is dry.”

Paraná’s declining flow, at its lowest level since the 1940s, has upset the sensitive ecosystems in the vast area that connects Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, forcing many communities to scramble for fresh water.

In a region that relies heavily on rivers to generate energy and transport agricultural commodities that are the cornerstone of national economies, the retreat of the continent’s second-largest river has also hurt trade, increasing energy production and shipping costs.

Experts say deforestation in the Amazon and rain patterns altered by a warming planet are helping fuel the drought. Much of the moisture that turns into rain that feeds Paraná’s tributaries originates in the Amazon rainforest, where trees release water vapor in a process scientists refer to as “flying rivers.”

Widespread deforestation has disrupted this moisture flow, weakening the streams that feed the larger rivers in the basin, and altering the landscape.

“It’s much more than a water issue,” said Lucas Micheloud, a Rosario-based member of the Argentine Society of Environmental Lawyers. Frequent fires have turned resource-rich rainforests into savannas, he said.

Although the water level has varied in different places, Paraná is currently 10.5 feet below its normal flow, according to Juan Borus, an expert at Argentina’s government-run National Water Institute who has studied the river for more than three decades.

The situation is likely to worsen at least until early November, which marks the start of the rainy season in the region, but the drought could last longer. Experts say climate change is making it harder to make accurate predictions.

Researcher Lincoln Alves of Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, who worked on the latest report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that extreme events such as droughts that affect much of South America are “becoming more frequent and more intense.”

Argentina declared a six-month emergency for the Paraná River region in late July, calling the crisis the worst in 77 years. Government officials say they were caught off guard.

“We never thought we would reach the levels we are at now,” said Gabriel Fuks, who leads a team that coordinates the government’s response to emergencies across the country. “We were not prepared for this emergency”

Mr Fuks said the government’s top priority is to help the nearly 60 cities along the river whose water is dangerously low.

In Paraná, a riverside city about 125 miles from Rosario, a pump that supplies 15 percent of the water to 250,000 cities recently stopped working because the water level was too low. The city’s water services technical coordinator, Leonardo Marsilli, said city officials had to devise a solution in a hurry.

Along the river, low water levels are affecting daily life.

For 15-year-old Luciano Fabián Carrizo, who lives in El Espinillo, the same river island community as Fisherman Mr. Garate, the sudden disappearance of the water means he has to walk two hours to get to school. The trip would have taken him 15 minutes by boat.

Across the river, one of the city’s ports, Terminal Puerto Rosario, the authorities had to extend the booms of the cranes more than two meters to reach the ships, said Gustavo Nardelli, one of the port’s managers.

And in downtown Rosario, Guillermo Wade, chairman of the Chamber of Maritime and Port Operations, does feverish calculations every morning to figure out how much cargo ships can be loaded without risking getting stuck in the shallowest parts of the river.

Ships load 26 percent less than normal. Mr Wade fears that number could rise to as high as 65 percent this year if the most dire predictions come true.

“We are losing an excessive amount of cargo,” Mr. Wade said.

Shipowners are also increasing costs to compensate for the risk of being stranded in shallow waters.

The average price of a cruise has more than doubled since May, from $15,000 to $35,000 a day, according to Gustavo Idígoras, president of the Ciara-Cec chamber, which represents grain exporting companies.

The shallow Paraná River increased the cost of exporting agricultural products from Argentina by $315 million between March and August. According to an estimate by the Rosario Board of Trade. More than 80 percent of the country’s agricultural exports, including nearly all of the nation’s largest cash crop, soybeans, take the river to the Atlantic Ocean.

The lack of water also makes energy more expensive for Argentina and Brazil, where underperforming dams force governments to rely more heavily on more expensive energy sources.

Club Náutico Sportivo Avellaneda, a riverside nautical club in Rosario, had to fortify the quays that were at risk of sudden collapse. Sailing boats and small yachts are lowered to the ground.

“There’s usually four meters of water in this section and now it’s completely dry,” said club president Pablo Creolani. “We never thought something like this could happen”

This type of drought will become more common in the future, causing potentially irreversible changes to the local ecosystem, the scientists say.

“Maybe this isn’t the new normal, but it’s a new situation that won’t be that rare anymore,” said Walter Collischonn, a hydrologist at Brazil’s Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.

Some blame Brazil, Argentina’s giant neighbor, whose environmental protection agencies have been gutted and the government is trying to facilitate mining and land development in the Amazon.

“All this happened thanks to the disaster they carried out in Brazil. “They cut everything down,” said Gabriel Callegri, 50, fisherman from El Espinillo. “Who wouldn’t be mad at that?”

60-year-old retired Viviana Aguilar, who has rowed along the Paraná River for more than two decades, finds it hard to believe how much the landscape has changed in the past year with the emergence of islands that were once only water.

“It is humanity that puts nature at risk,” he said.

Manuela Andreoni contributed to the news from Rio de Janeiro.