‘Monster’ rules Nepal village on frontline of global warming
By Gopal Sharma; editing by Paul Casciato
27 January 2012 BARAHBISE, Nepal (Reuters) – Looking at the swirling grey waters of the Bhote Koshi River, Ratna Kaji remembers when it turned into a “monster,” leaving behind a trail of death and destruction. “It came down roaring, washed away homes and people when they were sleeping,” the 77-year-old said of the 1996 flood, caused by a massive landslide that blocked the river which eventually gushed out by breaking its mud wall. “People had hardly any time to gather their belongings.” Within minutes, the flood washed away 54 people in this beautiful but rugged area, destroying 22 houses and a section of the Kodari road, a major artery connecting the Nepali capital of Kathmandu to Tibet. The road is also used by climbers to get to the northern side of Mount Everest. That wasn’t the first time that Kaji saw tragedy strike the area around Barahbise, a trading town of more than 6,000 people some 100 km (62 miles) northeast of Kathmandu — and climate scientists fear it won’t be the last. Global warming, which is hitting Nepal particularly hard, is causing glaciers to melt, raising the spectre of another disaster like the one in 1981. Then, the flow from a glacial lake in Tibet set off a flood that killed at least five people in Nepal and caused widespread destruction. There are more than 3,200 glaciers in Nepal, and 14 of them are at risk of bursting the dams which control the melting water that flows from them, officials say. “The melting of glaciers that forms lakes can only be attributed to climate change,” said Arun Bhakta Shrestha, climate change specialist at the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), which studies climate change in the Hindu Kush Himalayas. “There is no reason other than this for the change in the glaciers.” According to ICIMOD, which oversees a vast swathe of rugged land from Pakistan to Myanmar, the earth’s temperature has increased by an average of 0.74 degrees Celsius over the past 100 years. But warming across the Himalayas has been greater than the global average, with dire consequences. Government officials said the average temperature in Nepal was rising by 0.06 degrees Celsius annually, due in part to its location between India and China, two of the world’s heaviest polluters. Over the past three decades, Bhutan’s glaciers have shrunk by 22 percent and Nepal’s by 21 percent, according to three studies recently released by ICIMOD. They add that the melting glaciers will have an adverse impact on biodiversity, hydropower, industries, and agriculture, flooding hydroelectric plants and inundating fields. The region is also becoming ever more dangerous to live in. The area in Tibet where the Bhote Koshi River originates has several glacial lakes, Shrestha said. Nine of them are at risk of bursting their dams. “This could happen any time and the downstream areas are at very high risk of another flood,” said the bespectacled scientist. […]
