By Simon Hooper for CNN

“There is less water now,” says Leocadia Quispe, a 60-year-old mother, grandmother and potato farmer. Seven of her eight children have left the region, she says, because there is no way for them to make a living. Most of the men of the village have also gone, heading to the conjoined urban sprawl of nearby La Paz and El Alto in search of work, returning just once or twice a month to see their wives and families.

Each day Quispe spends hours hauling two five-litre containers of water by hand from a nearby river. “We used to be able to get water for irrigation from the streams that came down from the glacier. But the streams are no longer there, so now we supplement the water from a river further up in the valley,” she explains.

Jaime Nadal, the United Nations Population Fund’s (UNFPA) representative in Bolivia, said that Quispe’s situation was far from unusual. “Young people tend to leave these areas. Old women are typically left in the community having to perform harder and harder tasks to keep up the household. We already see mostly old women in many of these communities.”

In a report released on Wednesday, UNFPA warns that it is women in the developing world such as Quispe who are bearing the brunt of the worsening and accelerating impact of climate change.

“Women are on the front lines of many societies buffeted by climate change — and research indicates they tend to be more vulnerable to these impacts,” said the report’s lead author, Robert Engelman.

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