WATER POLITICS

Filmmaker and environmental activist Jamyang Jamtscho Wangchuk brought a bit of his beloved Himalayas to the COP28 climate summit in Dubai last week. Around 250 milliliters of it, to be precise.

In a plastic Coca-Cola bottle he had found discarded in the mountains, Wangchuk collected water from three glacial lakes: Jichu Drake and Thorthormi in his home country of Bhutan and the highest glacial lake in the world, on Mount Everest’s South Col. These form part of a landscape better known for its beautiful peaks than as a key Asian battleground in the fight against global warming.

Nearly 2 billion people — a quarter of the world’s population — in countries from Afghanistan to India, Myanmar and China depend on the Hindu Kush Himalaya region as a water source. Its glaciers feed giant waterways like the Brahmaputra, Ganges, Indus, Irrawaddy, Mekong, Yangtze, Yellow River and many more.

The water in Wangchuk’s bottle represented the “dying glaciers due to climate change,” he said. Glaciers in the region are melting at an alarming rate — 65% faster between 2011 and 2020 than in the previous decade, according to the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), an intergovernmental research institution based in Kathmandu.

Nepal’s mountains have already lost a third of their ice over the last 30 years. Floods linked to glacial melting are increasingly common, and the melting was a factor in deadly floods that devastated Pakistan last year.

In a breakthrough reflecting the urgency of the situation, risks to mountainous countries were officially recognized for the first time at COP28, during which U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for action.

“Unless we change course, we will unleash catastrophe,” he said. “The glaciers could disappear altogether. That means massively reduced flows for major Himalayan rivers like the Indus, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra. Deltas decimated by saltwater. Low-lying communities wiped out.”

COP28 reaffirmed the aim of keeping the global average temperature rise to within 1.5 C, but data shows the world is wildly off the mark. In the best-case scenario, glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalayas will lose a third of their volume in 80 years. Current emission trends suggest the loss could be close to 80%. An “overshoot” scenario of briefly topping 1.5 C also points to catastrophe.

Filmmaker Wangchuk cycles to glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalaya region to see for himself what is happening and raise awareness through his documentaries. He has spoken to everyone from Mount Everest sherpas to Pakistan flood survivors. Many do not know about climate change as such, he said, but “the impact is very clear.”

“Everybody I’ve met, one way or the other, they’re living it, they’re living the [climate] crisis.”

The Hindu Kush Himalaya area stretches 3,500 kilometers and includes Earth’s highest mountain range. It is warming at a rate of 0.3 C per decade, faster than the global average, according to the U.N.’s science body for climate change.

Arun Bhakta Shrestha, a senior climate change specialist at ICIMOD, said such impacts are “very, very far-reaching.”

Of high concern are outburst floods that are triggered when meltwater causes glacial lakes to overflow and cascade down the mountains at high speed. This has become “quite common,” he said.

In one example in October, a glacial Himalayan lake burst its banks following heavy rain, causing the Teesta River in northeastern India to flood, which washed away a 60-meter-tall dam that was part of a 1.2-gigawatt hydropower project in Sikkim state and devastated villages all the way to Bangladesh. Over 100 were reported to have died in that disaster.

More than 200 of the over 2,000 glacial lakes in the Hindu Kush Himalayas are considered by ICIMOD to be dangerous due to the risk of glacial lake outburst floods — a number set to rise as glaciers melt, creating more and larger lakes.

“Our livelihood, lifestyle is in danger,” said Yasso Kanti Bhattachan, an activist who attended COP28 and belongs to the Thakali people of the Thasang area in Nepal’s Mustang region bordering Tibet.

“The mountain herbs are dying, and [there is] disease. … The weather is changing, there is excessive rainfall also,” she said. Mosquitoes have become a new problem for mountain villages as temperatures rise, and traditionally constructed homes cannot withstand the new pounding rain.

After floods come droughts. If Himalayan glaciers melt away, the main rivers of Asia will dry up, causing intractable problems in countries small and large.

India, for one, will not only face flooding — its energy security and transition to clean energy will also suffer. India buys about 70% of the hydropower produced by Bhutan. The landlocked, mountainous nation makes a living off the installed capacity of 2.3 GW of hydropower it can produce each year, and has the potential for an estimated 33 GW. Hydropower generation brought in about a quarter of the government’s total revenue, according to state-owned Druk Green Power Corp., which operates the power plants.

Dawa Chhoedron, chief engineer at Bhutan’s Department of Energy, said at COP28 that climate change makes rain less predictable and causes more damage from debris after intense downpours. These, in turn, make hydropower more erratic as an energy source. Because hydropower is the most vulnerable to climate threats, there is a need to design and operate generators that are more resilient to fluctuations, she said.

Diversification is another imperative. Last year, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) announced it would support the construction of Bhutan’s first utility-scale solar power plant.

Nepal is similarly dependent. Nestled between China and India, it has the potential to generate 42 GW of economically viable hydropower. It already has purchase agreements with India and plans to sell to Bangladesh as it expands its installed capacity.

Yet one study found that 210 existing and planned dams in Nepal are in basins that face “medium to very high” risks of water scarcity and flooding by 2050, raising questions about such projects’ viability. India has 184, according to the analysis.

Those experiencing the worst effects of climate change in the Hindu Kush Himalayas are not the culprits. Around 70% of Bhutan is covered in forests that sequester roughly 9.5 million metric tonnes of carbon annually compared with the country’s carbon emissions output of around 2.7 million tonnes, according to government data.

Nepal’s carbon emissions accounted for 0.11% of the world’s total in 2022, while India and China were responsible for 7.3% and 29.2%, respectively.

Nepal’s Joint Secretary for the Ministry of Forests and Environment Maheshwar Dhakal has called on industrialized countries to help protect mountains. Nepal estimates that adapting to climate change would cost it $47 billion.

With the U.N. Environment Programme, it is adding forestry and water management practices to boost terraced farming to prevent the worst landslides. But whatever it does will have little impact if neighboring large emitters do not act. “Nepal alone can do nothing,” Dhakal said.

Dhakal also called for contributions to the newly established loss and damage fund for climate or pay directly for regional programs. He suggested that a mechanism that adds the calculated cost of environmental services to the price of hydropower generated by the country could be another option.

Meanwhile, ICIMOD’s Shrestha said a cross-border system for early flood warnings is crucial — but hard to implement because water resources are considered a national security issue.

“Sharing even water-related data is very, very sensitive in those areas,” he said. “Because it is related to water, they are not collaborating even in reducing the disaster risks.”

Nonetheless, ICIMOD has developed a community-based early warning system for floods, with pilot programs in Afghanistan, India, Nepal and Pakistan.

Sensors transmit information about water levels upstream to trained personnel who can interpret the data and warn downstream communities and government agencies through texts or telephone calls, or by raising flags and signs.

During COP28, the ADB launched an initiative to assess and manage climate and disaster risks in the region. This could include measures such as early warning systems for small glacial lakes or building more resilient infrastructure, with a focus on Bhutan and Nepal.

Whether these actions will be enough is questionable. While official recognition of the risks to the region does indicate progress, Thasang activist Bhattachan sounded a warning to those in power: “No one can sell Mother Nature. We are taking, and she is a giver. We are not taking care of her.”