Nepal's people face climate crisis

Science, activists and communities work to mitigate the effects of warming on the glaciers of the Himalaya

By Marc Ethier

For Friends of the Earth

“All afternoon the trail continues up the Kali Gandaki, which rushes down from Mustang and Tibet onto the Ganges plain; because it flows between the soaring massifs of Annapurna and Dhaulagiri, both more than 26,000 feet in altitude, the Kali Gandaki has the deepest canyon of any river in the world.

“… So far from the nearest sea, I am taken aback by the sight of a purple land crab, like a relict of the ancient days when the Indian subcontinent, adrift on the earth’s mantle, moved northward to collide with the Asian land mass, driving these marine rocks, inch by inch, five miles into the skies … The rise of the Himalaya, began in the Eocene, some fifty million years ago, is still continuing: an earthquake in 1959 caused mountains to fall into rivers and changed the course of the great Brahmaputra, which comes down out of Tibet through north-eastern India to join the Ganges near its delta at the Bay of Bengal. All the great rivers of southern Asia fall from the highest country in the world, from the Indus that empties into the Arabian Sea east to the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, the Mekong and the Yangtze, and even the great Hwang Ho that pours eastwards across all of China into the Yellow Sea; since they come from the Tibetan Plateau, these rivers are much older than the mountains, and the Kali Gandaki forged its great abysses as the mountains rose.”

-- Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

In north-central Nepal, in the low Himalaya where the mountains come down to the lowlands and the vegetation, protected by high walls of rock from the bitter winds of the frozen north, is lush and green, the paths on which mule trains and villagers and Western trekkers traffic are precipitous. Ancient stone steps disappear into a permanent mist that crawls down from the bald white crowns of the Annapurna Range: the marble has a knee-weakening toughness. Between the cliffside hamlet of Ghorepani and the deep-valley settlement of Hille the path drops more than 4,200 feet.

Between those two towns, near the tiny village of Ulleri on a pair of landings between vertiginous stretches of hard, slick, stone stair, are two monuments. Cut out of the same rock that serves as the foundation for homes, bridges, pathways, culverts and walls throughout the region, standing quietly beneath banyan trees in the steady wind, the monuments commemorate a recent disaster. One that many fear will become all too common in coming years.

Last December a late-night flash-flood caught Ulleri by surprise, sweeping down from the mountains and killing 30 people as they slept. Nine of the dead were from a single family. Some 90 horses were also lost to the raging waters, dragged down into the swirling blackness of the Kali Gandaki far below.

The mudslide followed unusually torrential, out-of-season rains, devastating the small hillside community. Ulleri’s disaster followed a fatal flood in September in southeast Nepal, in the flat region known as the Terai into which the waters of the Himalaya’s many rivers run. The village of Khetbari was deluged – for the second time in three years – after powerful rains swelled the nearby Jugedi; most of the town was completely destroyed.

Unfortunate as they are such catastrophes are no longer viewed by science, or by the local populations they affect, as anomalous. They are the undeniable byproduct of shifting weather patterns that play havoc with the monsoon season. And that portend worse disasters: As temperatures rise because of global warming, glaciers in the High Himalaya melt, filling lakes beyond their capacity.

Should those lakes burst their natural dams, whole villages would face extinction.

The danger is anything but remote, says Prakash Mani Sharma of Friends of the Earth’s Nepal branch, Pro Public, who works on the issue out of his office in Kathmandu. “If the dams burst, what happens? How do you live with that? No way,” he says. “You’re washed out, everything – your family, everything – is gone. And if all the fresh water is gone, what do you do?”

Traditional, and precarious, subsistence

Himalayan agriculture is and has always been precarious. Villages subsist with small rice, apple and wheat farms on the few flat spaces that can be cultivated, mostly in river floodplains and on terraces of a kind seen across Asia that make steep hillsides arable.

The people of Nepal’s Himalaya rely on a delicate balance of precipitation and mountain-desert aridity, any disruption of which results in chaos. World authorities now believe that chaos is all but imminent. Temperatures in the high mountains are rising by 0.09 degrees Celcius annually, compared to 0.04 degrees in the Terai, according to Nepal’s Department of Hydrology and Meteorology. Increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are expected to raise mountain temperatures by 6 degrees over the next 100 years – a calamitous development.

Crop patterns, ecosystems, vegetation, and human habitation in Nepal’s singular topography all are threatened by this change. The UN estimates that 44 lakes in Bhutan and Nepal will burst their dams within a decade. More will follow as temperatures climb. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declares that over the next 20 to 30 years, increased flooding and drastically depleted crop yields will result from the melting glaciers.

Looking further down the road, the loss of so much source water foretells severe shortages for the 400 million people in India and Bangladesh who depend on Nepal to supply their water. Sixty percent of the Ganges River comes from Nepal.

While the world’s top producers of carbon emissions – including the United States – continue an oblique pursuit of “further research” and talk increasingly of “adaptation” to climate change, the countries least responsible for the crisis bear its brunt. “Adaptation you can do to some extent, but there are some areas where you can’t,” says Pro Public’s Sharma. “We must change our behavior and do as soon as possible, whatever is possible. We’re wise enough, I think.

“It is known that this is happening, so developed nations need to improve their behavior, they need to put all their resources, energy and technology to try to mitigate it. Adaptation? For whom? If you talk of that you are thinking only of yourself and not the countries that have not contributed at all to the problem, and are going to suffer much.”

The fight to address the problem, and those who fight it

In the mountains of Nepal, where the dead are memorialized by stone monuments beneath swaying banyan trees, a way of life that has changed little over millennia is now facing drastic disruption. The living go on, but the future is uncertain.

Yet as activists and communities gear up for the fight to draw international attention to the looming crisis, optimism – perhaps Nepal’s most valuable natural resource – reigns. “We feel that one day the victory is there,” Sharma says. “People are listening. People have a strong power, especially people from developed countries, if they feel their fellow human beings are suffering because of things they have been doing, and because of wrong policies of government. They will force change.

“Change is coming. I am hopeful we will have a different world. All the people working on these issues – Friends of the Earth and others – are frustrated, but they have energy. We enjoy the work. We see that we are not alone, that people around the world, our friends, they are struggling. Journalists are supporting our cause, lawyers are presenting on these issues, and then you find someone in government also allying with you, interested in supporting your cause by providing information. So that’s the energy.”

Pro Public, working with such luminaries as Sir Edmund Hillary, most recently directed its energy toward a petition to UNESCO to designate Sagarmatha National Park as a World Heritage Site in Danger. There, as in much of the Himalaya, water drainage issues threaten not only humans in the region but rare animals like the snow leopard. The petition is the first ever presented to UNESCO by a country’s people rather than government; Sharma has hopes it will be addressed by the world body as soon as this year.

It’s just one of many fights this lawyer-turned-activist has engaged in since founding Pro Public in 1991. His is a spirit common among the economically disadvantaged, but spiritually strong and determined, Nepali people.

They’ll need that spirit – every ounce – for the climate challenge ahead.

“Nepal may be very rich in natural resources but economically it is very poor,” he says. “The people and the government here are helpless to deal with the problem alone. Remedial work needs to be carried out by the richer nations – and specifically by those whose activities have caused the problem in the first place.

“I’m very much optimistic that this is a struggle we’ll keep on winning, and when we are all together – all the people who are really concerned about the Mother Earth – we will win.”

See the Interview with Prakash: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2v9Mw4f2nw 

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