Himalaya villagers confront drought, flood, and receding glaciers

By Andrew Buncombe
Friday, 22 January 2010 At times, the moonscape land of Ladakh can appear as dry as a desert. In this most northerly part of India, tucked high in the Himalayas, there is virtually no rainfall and almost 75 per cent of the local farmers rely on meltwater from the glaciers to irrigate their once-a-year crops. It was in Ladakh, confronted by receding glaciers – currently at the centre of an increasingly bitter dispute between scientists and Delhi – that Chewang Norphel, a government engineer, hit upon an idea to use nature to give the locals a helping hand with growing more food. Seeing how much fresh water was wasted during the winter – as villagers left their taps running to prevent them freezing solid – and noticing the way that they stored snow on shaded areas of the mountain, he decided to create his own artificial glaciers. … Natural glaciers, he explained, begin to melt in June or July but by locating his artificial constructions 4,000ft lower down the valley, he is able to ensure they melt in May, which is typically when farmers finish sowing their crops. Last year his teams built three glaciers for Stamko, one of many villages that have suffered from a drastic lack of water for farming. “There are a total of 113 rural villages in Ladakh and 80 of them depend on the glaciers for irrigation,” he said. The magical but fragile eco-system of Ladakh and its traditional inhabitants are threatened most directly by the ironic combination of droughts and floods. Mr Norphel, 74, is certain of several things: that the glaciers are retreating more quickly than before; that the region receives less snowfall and moisture than it did when he was younger; and that the region is progressively getting warmer. The engineer’s instincts are supported by a survey recently conducted by Geres India, a rural development organisation based in Ladakh. It found a remarkable rising trend of average temperatures by 1C for winter and 5C for summer between 1973 and 2008. During the same period, rainfall and snowfall had shown a clear declining trend. “Altogether snowfall has come down by almost 60 per cent in the past 50 years,” the group’s spokesman, Tundup Angmo, told Reuters. … Yet Mr Norphel is under no doubts about the reality of what is happening to the environment in which he grew up and where he is now trying to use nature to help itself. “When I was small, if there was a foot of snow it would last for six months. Now it will melt in a week,” he said. “That is the result of climate change.”

Creating glaciers out of thin air