In the mountains of northeast Peru, a group of women beekeepers have plucked millions of the industrious insects from the jaws of death and saved their own livelihoods with the help of UN climate funding. The women not only rescued the bees’ hives from extreme weather events linked to climate change, but built a thriving honey business. Chilal de la Merced, a village of some 800 souls perched at over 2,600 meters (8,500 feet) in the Andes, in Peru’s Cajamarca region, has been battered in recent years by recurring heavy rains, droughts, frosts and hail storms linked to a changing climate and warming oceans.
The weather has played havoc with the bees’ ability to forage for nectar and pollen. In early 2022, the rains were so heavy that they didn’t venture out of the hive at all, and began to starve. “When we checked the hives, we found the boxes full of dead bees,” Karina Villalobos, the 28-year-old spokeswoman for the Hojuelas de Miel (Honey Flakes) beekeepers association, recalled.
A year earlier, she and 14 other beekeepers had applied for a grant from Avanzar Rural, a program founded by the Peruvian government and the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) to help small-scale food producers in rural areas vulnerable to climate change. It almost didn’t work -- climate change doesn’t wait for grant money, and even when funds arrive, projects take time to implement. Months after they secured $27,000 in climate funding -- a topic at.