South Asian ministers will gather in Nepal next week for talks on the threat that climate change poses to the Himalayas and to the 1.3 billion people dependent on water flowing from the mountains.
Experts say the Himalayan glaciers are melting at an alarming rate, and with months to go before a key summit in Copenhagen, mountain nations are hoping to highlight the myriad problems facing the region.
Climate change campaigners refer to the Himalayas as the “third pole” and say the melting glaciers are the biggest potential contributors to rising sea levels after the north and south poles.
But until now Himalayan governments have not come together to lobby for ambitious emission reduction targets at December’s Copenhagen summit, which aims to seal a new international climate change accord.
“Nepal’s message needs to be heard, and the message of the mountains needs to be heard,” said World Bank water and climate expert Claudia Sadoff, who is helping Nepal’s government organize the conference on Monday and Tuesday. “The Himalayas have their own very real set of challenges, but there are also a lot of adaptation and mitigation opportunities in the mountains.”
Glaciers in the Himalayas, a 2,400km range that sweeps through Pakistan, India, China, Nepal and Bhutan, provide headwaters for Asia’s nine biggest rivers, a lifeline for the 1.3 billion people who live downstream.
But temperatures in the region have increased by between 0.15ºC and 0.6ºC per decade for the last 30 years, and the effects are already being felt.
In Nepal and Bhutan, the melting glaciers have formed vast lakes that threaten to burst, devastating communities downstream.
Low-lying Bangladesh has always been prone to flooding, but leading environment scientist Atiq Rahman said the speed at which the Himalayan glaciers were melting meant floods were now “more frequent and more vigorous.”
Last year Nepal suffered its driest winter in 40 years, bringing the first widespread forest fires the country has experienced and destroying crops that depend on the winter rains.
Campaigners say that while the effects of climate change on low-lying South Asian countries such as Bangladesh and the Maldives are now well known, there is little international awareness of the vulnerability of the Himalayan region.
“The general impression is that the Himalayas are huge, impregnable, pristine spaces no one can hurt. But the fact is that they are melting,” said Tariq Aziz, leader of the WWF’s Living Himalayas initiative. “The Himalayas are not just mountains. They are a source of sustenance for millions and their most valuable commodity is water.”
Nepal’s government, which has invited environment ministers from across South Asia to attend the talks, said it hoped to “take a regional voice on climate change to Copenhagen.”
“The glaciers are melting and the temperatures are rising in the Himalayas,” environment secretary Uday Raj Sharma said. “This will ultimately affect people’s livelihoods not only in Nepal but also downstream.”
Some observers have expressed concern that India, which opposes binding carbon emission cuts, will drown out the voices of smaller countries such as Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh at the Copenhagen talks.
New Delhi does not plan to send anyone from the national government to next week’s conference in Nepal, an absence that will inevitably weaken any message that comes out of the talks.
India’s environment secretary Jairam Ramesh recently expressed skepticism as to whether the melting of the Himalayan glaciers is caused by climate change, saying more research was needed.
Meanwhile, three years ago Naina Shahi’s husband left their small village in rural Nepal to seek work in neighboring India, leaving her to bring up their three children alone.
The dry winters and unpredictable monsoons Nepal has experienced in recent years had hit crop production on the couple’s land plot in the foothills of the Himalayas, forcing them to look for other ways to feed their family.
For the past two years, their crop has failed entirely and Shahi now buys rice on credit from a local shopkeeper while she waits for her husband to return to their village with his earnings.
“My husband stopped farming because this place is not good for growing crops. We needed to earn money to feed the children,” Shahi, 35, said in the remote village of Bhattegaun in mid-western Nepal.
“There is not enough rainfall for the crops to grow well and we have to walk for two or three hours every day to get water,” she said.
International aid agency Oxfam says Nepal’s changing weather patterns are threatening the livelihoods of hundreds of desperately poor communities already struggling to produce enough food to survive.
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