Himalayan glaciers are retreating at an alarming rate
-- Pic Al Jazeera
An ode to a dead glacier. Well, that’s exactly what scientists in Iceland plan to do. On Aug 18, scientists from Rice University and Iceland are planning to put up a memorial for the first glacier – called Ok glacier -- that has disappeared in western Iceland. The poignant message on the memorial plaque states: “Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and know what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.”
Ok glacier in Iceland is the first glacier to disappear but will certainly not be the last. As the plaque states all its glaciers are expected to disappear in another 200 years. But thirty years from now, in 2050, I am sure many people who read this message will curse the present generation for the disappearing act, for the extremely hot and dry planet we left for them, depriving them of their share of a happy world to live in. They certainly would know what wrong we did.
I think it is an excellent idea to set up memorials for our dying glaciers. But if that be so, the Himalayas would be inundated with memorials all across the Himalayan mountain range extending from Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, and Bhutan and to China. Termed as the water tower, Himalayas carry nearly 40 per cent of the earth’s fresh water. But with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) estimating that more than 50,000 glaciers are rapidly shrinking, the pace at which these glaciers are disappearing will leave behind a trail of destruction for almost 1.3 billion people living on either side of the highest mountain range.
The Himalayas have also been called as the third pole since they carry the third largest volume of ice after Antarctica and the Arctic. So it is not only that the two poles of the planet – Antarctica and Arctic those are melting, Himalayas too are equally vulnerable. Although not as fast as the European Alps, which have seen many glaciers dying in the past decade. Perhaps one reason for this is that the temperatures had started rising in Europe much earlier than in South Asia.
Nevertheless, I was expecting a kind of an outrage in India when a recent comprehensive study conducted at the Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory concluded that the Himalayas are losing more than one and a half foot of ice every year since the year 2000. Prior to that, the Himalayan meltdown between 1975 and 2000 was to the extent of 10 inches every year. Interesting this study does not include the high-mountain ranges of Asia – Pamir, Hindu Kush and Tian Shan. The cumulative impact of meltdown would certainly be disastrous for the entire Asian region. However, this alarming meltdown in the Himalayan ice cover should have shocked the nation; after all it will eventually strike a deadly blow to people living in the Hindi heartland. But except for a few headlines here and there, I did not see any public outrage. Newspapers didn’t even think it fit to raise this issue in its editorials, and the TV channels were busier with political statements without much relevance.
Based on declassified photographic images taken by US spy satellites as well as routine satellite images spanning 650 glaciers across the region, this study showed how the Himalayas are on a yearly basis losing up to 8 billion litres of water every year. This equals 3.2 million Olympic sized swimming pools being drained out every year. For a country emerging out of a water shock that Chennai in coastal south India went through recently, the shrinking of ice cover in the Himalayas should have made us sit back and think. After all, it is everyone’s future that is at stake, and people must start worrying about the state of water-less economy that we are leaving behind for our children. A strong public opinion could have jolted the nation, and I was hoping Parliament would sit for an impromptu mid-night session.
But nothing like this happened. Except for blaming agriculture for (mis)utilising 78 per cent of the available irrigation water, life went on as usual. So much so that another news report quoting a study by the Central Water Commission and pointing to a decline in water availability from the three major river basins – Indus, the Ganges and Brahmaputra – all emanating from the Himalayas, and serving as a lifeline for the entire northern region and extending up to central India, went unnoticed. The average water potential in the three river basins has declined by almost 40 per cent. A State of Forest Report 2015 had earlier shown that the decreased river flow is on account of cutting down of 628 square kms of forest cover in north and eastern Indian region.
Under such circumstances, where billions of people living downstream face prospects of river drying up, and thereby acerbating the water crisis hitting agriculture, industry as well as drinking water supply, shouldn’t the Himalayan states – Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, West Bengal, Meghalaya, Assam, Tripura, Mizoram, Manipur, and Nagaland – come together to collectively formulate a policy framework for protecting the hills? Why suitable policies can’t be put in place to ensure the repeat of Kedarnath devastation does not happen, and why riparian states can’t join hands and collectively invest to protect the river catchments? Ascribing an economic value to the eco-system services that mountains provide, and that includes the services that come from water, maintaining the tree cover, protecting soil erosion, wildlife etc and incorporating it in the state GDP calculations is surely a way to measure economic wealth that mountains provide. Reckless exploitation of hills in the name of development has to stop. This may require a new and distinct development paradigm for the hill states, which rely more on protecting nature and environment. Research programmes too need to suitably modify. I don’t see any logic in agricultural universities in the mountains doing farm research which is exactly a copy of research being done in the plains.#
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