tropical-glacier-ecosystem-rle-utac

GenesisAeon Package 123 — real tropical glacier ecosystem collapse science, IUCN Red List of Ecosystems framing, Andes and East Africa. Deliberately has no UTAC/CREP/AFET bridge — see DISCLAIMER.md.

For a plain-language explanation of the same topic (German, no jargon, written for general audiences), see WHITEPAPER.md.

Where this package came from

Surfaced via a six-document multi-AI gap-analysis of the GenesisAeon climate/ecology portfolio (KlimaAktuell/, 2026-09-01), then independently deep-dive verified before building — alongside ocean-acidification-utac (P122), marine-compound-stressors-utac (P124), assisted-gene-flow-utac (P125), and climate-landuse-biodiversity-nexus-utac (P126). Extends the existing glacier-buffer series (glacier-buffer-utac P99 onward) into IUCN Red List of Ecosystems (RLE) collapse-diagnosis territory — a related but different question to that series' hydrological-buffer framing.

What's real here

• Ferrer-Paris, Llambi, Melfo & Keith (2024, Oryx) — the first-ever IUCN Red List of Ecosystems assessment of a tropical glacier ecosystem (Cordillera de Merida, Venezuela): 90% ice decline over 1998-2019, an annual rate of 5.173±0.130%/year, projected total disappearance within ~5 years of the assessment, and 79% of climate models predicting complete collapse by 2070. Status: Critically Endangered (CR) — evidence is consistent with the ecosystem already being Collapsed (CR-CO).
• Hinzmann, Moelg, Braun, Cullen, Hardy, Kaser & Prinz (2024, Environmental Research: Climate) — an independent geographic confirmation from East Africa: real 2021/2022 ice extents for Kilimanjaro (0.98 km², 8.6% of ~1900 extent), Mount Kenya (0.069 km², 4.2%), and Rwenzori (0.38 km², 5.8%) — kept per-mountain, never collapsed into the combined 1.36 km² total.
• Project Pressure Rwenzori expedition (2025) — Mount Stanley's glacier surface lost 29.5% between 2020-2024; Mount Baker and Mount Speke's glaciers have already fully disappeared.

Deliberately not one-sided

is_ecosystem_collapse_status_the_same_question_as_water_security() returns False — the Rwenzori feeds the Nile's headwaters, relied on by ~5 million people downstream, a real and serious concern in its own right. But an ecological RLE collapse diagnosis and a hydrological water-security assessment are genuinely different questions, and this package keeps them explicitly separate rather than conflating one for the other.

Quickstart

pip install tropical-glacier-ecosystem-rle-utac

from tropical_glacier_ecosystem_rle_utac import (
    ice_decline_pct_over_20_years,
    is_ecosystem_plausibly_already_collapsed,
    KILIMANJARO, MOUNT_KENYA, RWENZORI,
    is_ecosystem_collapse_status_the_same_question_as_water_security,
)

print(ice_decline_pct_over_20_years())  # 90.0
print(is_ecosystem_plausibly_already_collapsed())  # True
print(KILIMANJARO.extent_km2, MOUNT_KENYA.extent_km2, RWENZORI.extent_km2)
print(is_ecosystem_collapse_status_the_same_question_as_water_security())  # False

Development

pip install -e ".[dev]"
pre-commit install
ruff check src tests
mypy src
pytest

Citation

See CITATION.cff and .zenodo.json.