: Chile’s Reservoirs Are Evaporating Thanks to Climate Change. This Startup Is Trying To Stop It #WorldNEWS Leaning over the edge of a reservoir the size of two football fields, a farm technician swings

Chile’s Reservoirs Are Evaporating Thanks to Climate Change. This Startup Is Trying To Stop It #WorldNEWS
Leaning over the edge of a reservoir the size of two football fields, a farm technician swings an upturned gallon bottle wildly from side to side, tipping out its clear contents. “Do you like my technique?” he says with a laugh. An oily layer spreads out over the water. It calms the ripples and dulls the glimmer of Chile’s winter sunlight on its surface. For a few minutes, there’s an intense smell of acetone, like someone has spilled a giant bottle of nail polish remover.
At this blueberry farm an hour’s drive from Santiago, Hortifrut, one of the largest berry producers in South America, is trialing one solution to Chile’s unprecedented 13 year-drought. For the month of August, the liquid from the bottle, a mix of polymers and alcohol, sits on top of the water, never mixing with it. According to the manufacturer, Chilean startup O2 Company, this protective layer will cut the rate of evaporation by 50-80%, saving hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a month.

That’s a huge benefit in Chile. Drier, hotter conditions have drained lakes and left more than half the country’s 19 million people facing severe water scarcity. Less and less water flows from irrigation canals into Hortifrut’s reservoir, and the level now sits around 10 feet lower than normal. “We made this reservoir thinking it would provide us with a month of
,” says Denise Donnay, Hortifrut’s head of research and development. “But recently, it lasts a lot less. ”

Ciara NugentThe water level at Hortifruts blueberry farm reservoir sits far below its usual level in August.
Chile’s climate is transforming. The World Resources Institute projects that the country will face one of the world’s biggest increases in water stress by 2040. And with more than 80% of its water consumed by agriculture, industry, and mining, Chilean businesses are under immense pressure to find ways to boost supplies. They’re taking some big swings: mining companies in the north are resorting to energy-intensive factories to desalinate sea water in the desert. One startup is building artificial glaciers to trap surface runoff in the Andes mountains. Another is trapping moisture from the air to create new drinking water.
Carlos Korner, O2 Company’s founder, says his solution is “a little more homemade. ” A former publicist, he reached out to a chemist in 2018 to help him develop a product that could help combat Chile’s water scarcity. “To me evaporation seemed like the obvious place to start,” he says. A study published this year in Nature and which looked at 1.

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