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The Parched Tiger: India, High Water, and Its Discontents
December 17th, 2022
Via JSTOR Daily, commentary on whether India’s hydro-hegemony on water from the Hindu Kush Himalayan region may help avoid war over this limited resource: The Tibetan Plateau has been described as the “roof of the world.” Surrounded by high mountains, including the Himalayan range, it’s the highest and largest plateau on the planet. It’s also one […]
Read more »South Asia ‘Sorely Needs Transboundary River Accord’
June 1st, 2022
Via SciDevNet, an article on South Asia’s need for a transboundary river accord: Countries around the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna (GBM) basin lose over US$14.2 billion annually from lack of cooperation in sharing the waters of these rivers, with little prospect of accord in the foreseeable future, according to new analysis. “A lack of collaborative arrangements and unilateral exploitation […]
Read more »Mountain Water Supply to Two Billion People Could Change
January 18th, 2021
Courtesy of Scientific American (subscription required), a detailed look at how data about Earth’s 78 most important mountaintops foretell changes in the amount and timing of snowmelt: The nights are long inside a tent 5,300 meters above sea level at the snout of Nepal’s Yala Glacier. At 8:00 P.M., after a meal of Nepali dal bhat (lentils […]
Read more »Thirst Stalking Towns In The Himalayas
March 7th, 2020
Via India Climate Dialogue, a look at how urban settlements in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region are facing acute water scarcity due to dying mountain springs and changes brought on by climate change: The Hindu Kush Himalayan (HKH) region is the water tower for most of Asia, but many of its residents face increasing water […]
Read more »The Merchants of Thirst
January 11th, 2020
Courtesy of The New York Times, an interesting article on how – in many developing countries – private water tanker operators profit from growing water scarcity: It had been 11 days since a ruptured valve reduced Kupondole district’s pipeline flow to a dribble, and the phones at Pradeep Tamanz’s tanker business wouldn’t stop ringing. A […]
Read more »Thirsty Kathmandu Waits For Water That Never Arrives
December 13th, 2019
Via Third Pole.net, a report on how one of the most rapidly urbanising cities on the planet – the capital city of Nepal – is struggling with old projects sabotaged by controversies and bad strategies as its people go thirsty: In May of this year the residents of Nepal’s capital Kathmandu formally established a forum […]
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