2050: Global warming continues to cause a rise in ocean levels and extreme weather. Starvation, the spread of diseases, and deaths increase. Developing countries are the most affected (Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change).[break]
2035: The Himalayan glaciers have begun to disappear, causing massive freshwater shortages (Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change).
2030: Climate change kills almost a million people. Yearly economic losses due to global warming reaches $340 billion (Global Humanitarian Forum).
2020: The global agricultural gross domestic product declines by 16% (Institute for International Economics and the Center for Global Development in Washington).
2008: “If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm,” wrote James Hansen, the revered climate change expert, with his colleagues, in the paper Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?
Just how will it deal with a crisis as huge as climate change? One stop could be changing the way it is perceived: “For the most part, this is seen as a donor agenda, an international issue,” says Gagan Thapa, a member of the Constitutional Assembly’s Fundamental Rights Committee. “This is a mistake. Climate change relates to everything we are trying to deliver to the people. It’s a huge domestic agenda, one that we need to address in our constitution-drafting process.”
Pitamber Sharma, former vice chairman of the National Planning Commission, who also worked for over a decade with the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in Nepal, adds: “We don’t have a climate change policy. But there is an urgent need to understand and research this phenomenon’s implications in Nepal.”
For now, here is some of what we already know.
Himalayan Glaciers: The Melting Future
If morning tells the day, consider the Himalayan glaciers the dawn and its current situation an indication of our fragile future. he Himalayan glaciers will by and large dictate how much the Nepali people will suffer at the hands of climate change.
“The average minimum glacier retreat rate was 10m per year… The fastest retreating glacier was the Imja glacier, with an average rate of 59m/year and a surprising 74m/year for the past half decade,” noted a 2007 report by ICIMOD and UNEP/ROAP. Some scientists estimate that at least 20 glacial lakes might burst this year because of the rapid rate at which they are filling up in the Everest region alone.
In the short run, fast-receding glaciers would lead to Glacier Lake Outburst Floods (GLOF) that wreck havoc downstream, causing tremendous damage to agriculture and livelihood and increasing risks of water borne diseases. In the long run, droughts would become common. At least 15 GLOFs have been recorded in Nepal since 1970. When these glaciers are gone, in the next 25-30 years, according to IPCC, 10% of the world’s population will have forever lost their main source of freshwater. The repercussions will be brutal.
An article published in the Spring 2009 ICIMOD newsletter notes that because the glaciers are so endangered, hydropower potential based on rivers systems of the Eastern Himalayas “could also be severely impacted by climate change.” Hydropower remains at the core of Nepal’s immediate and long-term energy policy.
At the same time, earlier this year Lester Brown, the founder of the Earth Policy Institute, said that the melting glaciers of Asia are the biggest threat to food production the world has ever faced.
Food Security And Climate Change:
The food crisis of 2007/2008 led to inflation, protests, riots, and exceptional food export laws in various countries, and raised anxiety over food security all around. Unfortunately, this might just be an indicator of worse things to come.
A report by National Institute for Agro-Environmental Sciences in Japan indicates that as temperatures rise, pests and viruses will proliferate and increase crop vulnerability to pests. And economist William Cline of the Peterson Institute for International Economics and the Centre for Global Development estimates that global warming will cause the global agricultural gross domestic product (GDP) to decline by 16% in the next 10 years. In developing countries, he expects it to decrease by 20% (6% in industrialized countries).
This is a huge problem for a country like Nepal, which has consistently experienced food deficits since the 1990s. Most recently, 2.7 million people were identified by World Food Program (WFP) Nepal as requiring urgent food assistance in December 2008 (1.3 million people in January 2008). Recent data on Nepal’s 2008/2009-harvest season could be an indication of just how must more this crisis can inflate.
According to the joint Crop And Food Security Assessment (May 2009) produced by the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives, WFP and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Wheat and Barley -- Nepal’s two major winter crops -- decreased in production by 14.5% and 17.3% respectively. And nationally, “despite a strong summer harvest, yearly crop production for 2008/2009 resulted in a negative production balance of 133,000 metric tons of cereal (-2.5%).”
“One can argue about the impact of climate change, but the reality is that here in Nepal Mother Nature has increased her wrath,” WFP Country Representative, Richard Ragan says. “In 2006, WFP launched an emergency operation to help people suffering from prolonged drought. This was followed in 2007 by assistance to hundreds of thousands of people affected by the worst flooding in decades, and the Koshi River flood in 2008. Now, WFP is assisting more than 700,000 people affected by the worst winter drought in 40 years.” Erratic and extreme weather are, of course, hallmarks of global warming.
Forests for 350:
Forests are the lungs of the earth and human encroachment over it, its cancer. While tree trunks and roots act as carbon sinks, storing the CO2 that they continuously sequester from the atmosphere, deforestation remains a trend. In fact, not only do we need to protect the forests that exist today but we also need to immediately begin massive reforestation programs, carefully choosing the kinds of forests we are planting. Forests are also a potential source of income for the country via programs such as reducing emissions from deforestation and for degradation (REDD).
Yet, in Nepal, the last several years have been disastrous in terms of forest conservation. Timber smuggling, demand for firewood, and land encroachment are all chronic problems. Policy makers have also shown misguided tendencies to clear forest space to make more arable land available. Investing in newer technologies (e.g. Drought-resistant seeds) and improving agriculture infrastructures while preserving forests could be a more long-term approach to sustainability.
“Wildfires are related to climate change in two important and related ways: they cause and are caused by increases in greenhouse gas emissions,” wrote Ann Carlson on The Huffington Post last month. This year, forest fires have been a major disaster in Nepal. ICIMOD recorded 1,500 wildfires in March, compared to only 100 last March. Victims of the fire included several conservation areas such as the Kanchanjangha, Langtang, Annapurna and Makalu national parks, all located in high attitudes. Loss of wildlife habitat is an equally important and terrible byproduct of forest fires.
385ppm is Bad For Health:
In Kathmandu, the direct impact of pollution is already being seen as respiration problems spike up during the dry seasons. But here is what warming temperatures means for our health in the long run: Mosquitoes will be able to thrive in places of higher altitudes, infecting between 260 million to 320 million people with malaria and as much as 6 billion people with dengue fever by 2080. Warmer temperatures also speed up things such as the reproduction and development of parasites. Cholera and other water-borne diseases are expected to rise too. All this just by the prominent British medical journal Lancet and University College London published last month. It is no wonder they have warned that climate change is possibly the biggest health threat of this century with impacts starting to already become increasingly visible.
There’s more. According to an article published on Harvard Men’s Health Watch in March, exposure to ultraviolet B radiation, which causes skin cancer and cataracts, has increased in the United States. Warmer climate has also sped up ragweed growth, increasing asthma, allergies and hay fever there. The report goes on to add the spread of diseases carried by mosquitoes, diseases such as West Nile virus, viral encephalitis, and Lyme disease, is expected to grow too.
350 Nepal:
The biggest problem with climate change is of course that it affects developing and poor countries the most because of their inability to cope with it. Within those countries, too, the most poor and marginalized communities will suffer the most. And despite the seemingly small gap of 35ppm, getting from 385ppm to 350 is no simple feat.
Last year, the Chamber of Senators in Buenos Aries passed a law to establish a minimum budget for the protection of glaciers and the periglacial environment. “There is no question that the protection and valuation of glaciers, as ecosystems that are a fundamental part of the natural environment of our country and that represent one of the most important freshwater reserves for the Patagonian region, should be recognized and promoted by a national law,” Senator Daniel Filmus told the press at the time. In Nepal, such political realization on current and future concerns is unknown, at its own risk. Climate change mitigation and adaptations remain alien concepts to many policy makers. It’s time to create the climate for sustainable change. It’s time to buckle up and aim low: 350ppm.
Author can be reached at info@350nepal.org.
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