Peruvian Eduardo Gold has begun work on a 'bizarre but true' project to combat global warming in the mountains above Licapa, a small village in the Ayacucho region of the Andes midway between Lima and Cuzco.

Gold won a World Bank award of $200,000, one of 26 grants dispensed by the Bank after its '100 ways to Save the Planet' competition.

Fifty-five-year-old Gold has no scientific qualifications, so what is his solution?

The answer is that he has enlisted four helpers from Licapa to cover the 4,756m peak of Chalon Sombrero with whitewash.

More than 40 years ago locals remember Chalon Sombrero as having a huge white glacier. Today the mountain is simply bare rock and the river that provides the main water source for the village is a mere shadow of its former self.

The project is simple: the team makes environmentally friendly whitewash from lime, industrial egg white and water, transports it to the top of the mountain, and then slops it all over the rocks, turning the brown, arid summit back to its former colour.

The theory behind Gold's project lies in the concept of geoengineering the planet, or more specifically Solar Radiation Management (SRM) - reflecting sun light and hence heat back into the atmosphere.

Scientists agree this technique can work quite rapidly on a small scale and may be the only way to lower temperatures fast in the event of a crisis.

Gold is arguing that if he can reduce the temperature locally, the Chalon Sombrero glacier may regenerate. At the current rate of progress it will take about 70 weeks to cover all the main and subsidiary summits with whitewash.

In the last 40 years Peru has lost nearly a quarter of its glaciers to global warming, and hence a significant supply of water for drinking and irrigation.

In the same period, the Quelccaya Ice Cap in the Cordillera Oriental, the largest glaciated area in the tropics, has diminished by 30%.

Although it would seem impossible to employ the whitewash technique on a wider scale, scientists will be monitoring this remote region of South America to see if the experiment produces positive effects in a local environment.

The accompanying photo shows the Colque Cruz Group in the Cordillera Vilcanota, where glacial recession has been marked over the last 30 years. However, the high peaks, rising to 6,000m, are still well endowed with snow and ice.

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