Himalayas hotspot of climate change

Nandita Sengupta in the Times of India: It's 4,000 miles of mountains, seas and valleys from Kathmandu to Copenhagen. With changing climate, it could well become 4,000 miles of sudden storms, flood and climate migrations. Recognising that nations need to pool resources and expertise to face climate change impacts, South Asian countries came together for the first time earlier this week for a climate mini-summit in Kathmandu ahead of the Copenhagen meet in December.

Himalayan ecosystems are 'the hotspots'. That's the message from the two-day South Asian Regional Climate Change Conference. The region's nations have "come to a bit of understanding" of the climate change challenges that transcend political boundaries, say environmentalists and policy makers. "It's a big first step with a positive outcome," M S Mani, environmental economist at the World Bank, told TOI on phone.

The mighty Himalayas are acutely vulnerable to climate change. "The Himalayas have been warming three times as fast as the world average and their glaciers are shrinking more rapidly than anywhere else and could disappear by 2035. The Ganges and Indus could become seasonal rather than year-round rivers," recently wrote Newsweek's science editor Sharon Begley.

As the source of most of the region's major rivers, changes in Himalayan ecosystems can drastically alter the lives of more than the 700 million who live in the region. Lesser snow and fast-shrinking glaciers mean rivers becoming trickles and effectively India, Nepal and Bangladesh's water sources drying up. At the same time, coastal areas like Maldives, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are threatened by rising seas levels….

A traffic jam in the Rohtang Pass, Himachal Pradesh, India, shot by Woudloper, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License