Environment News
Service for the latest environmental news, current issues, climate, water,
food, forests, species, energy, education. RSS
feed.

Home
|   About   |   News
Index   |   Services
|   My Account   |   Events   |   Search

ENS News
for your company

Send Your
News to
the
World

Advertise
on
ENS!

Search
ENS!

Glaciers on the Roof of the World at
Risk

BANGKOK, Thailand, September 6, 2005 (ENS) - The mountains of Asia, including the
towering Himalayas, are facing accelerating threats from a
rapid rise in roads, settlements, overgrazing and
deforestation, experts are warning in a new report.

New calculations by experts with the Chinese Academy of
Sciences indicate that China’s highland glaciers are shrinking
by an amount equivalent to all the water in the giant Yellow
River each year.

There is concern that the region’s water supplies, fed by
glaciers and the monsoons and vital for around half the
world’s population, may be harmed alongside the area’s
abundant and rich wildlife.

"Mountain areas are especially important and particularly
vulnerable," said Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the UN
Environment Programme (UNEP). "These are the water towers of
the world and often home to unique wildlife species upon which
local people depend for food, medicines and other important
materials. They have often been saved from uncontrolled
development by their remoteness. But modern engineering
methods mean this is no longer the case," he said.

The report is being released in advance of the 2005 World
Summit in New York taking place in mid-September. There, heads
of state will assess the status of implementation of the
Millennium Development Goals, including the target of reducing
by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to
safe drinking water.

The new report points to a critical gap in the security of
the water to billions of people in Asia and the crucial role
of sound environmental management for sustainable development.

It claims that unchecked and piecemeal development are
likely to increase rates of forest loss triggering increased
levels of erosion, pollution and other potentially harmful
effects. Conversion of pristine areas into farm and grazing
land is aggravating the situation.

The findings come from a new report entitled "The Fall of
Water" launched Monday by IUCN-World Conservation Union and
UNEP.

At 22,966 feet, Nepal's Machhapuchhare is considered a
sacred mountain. Although people have climbed it, expeditions
are very rare, and they are not allowed to summit.
(Photo Ian Britton courtesy FreeFoto)

Information presented in the report was compiled
and supported by researchers from organizations including
UNEP, IUCN, the International Centre for Integrated Mountain
Development (ICIMOD), the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the
Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.

The study is based on a new way of assessing the direct and
cumulative impacts of infrastructure development called Global
Methodology for Mapping Human Impacts on the Biosphere or
GLOBIO.

The method was developed by UNEP’s GRID Arendal Centre in
southern Norway, the UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre
in United Kingdom and the Netherlands Environmental Assessment
Agency.

Satellite images reveal that deforestation and
unsustainable land use practices may explain why the Asian
rivers now have the largest sediment loads in the world and
why dissolved nutrients in the water are increasing more than
in any other region.

This is one of the primary causes for the increasing human
drought and flood related disasters in the region, including
the latest floods and resultant high number of casualties in
China and India, the scientists said.

By combining a range of local studies with satellite images
from 1960 up to today, the scientists have been able to reveal
for the first time the scale of land-use changes in the
region.

Toepfer said, "The Millennium Development Goals covering
poverty eradication and the better supply of sufficient, safe,
drinking water up to reversing the spread of disease cannot be
met without economic growth. But this needs to be carried out
in a way that conserves the life support systems and the
ecosystem services they provide. Otherwise it cannot be
sustainable for current or future generations."

India's Pindari Glacier lies at 12,532 feet in the Indian
Himalayas (Photo courtesy Travel
Himalayas)
IUCN Director General Achim
Steiner said, "The fragile mountain ecosystems across the
world are facing unprecedented threats. Some of these threats
such as climate change are irreversible. But it is in our
power to put development of these regions on a sustainable
path through integrated management which blends economic,
social and environmental interests."

The researchers said some countries, including China and
Nepal, are now acting to develop parks and protected areas
aimed at conserving the Asian region’s water supplies and
wildlife.

But the scientists warn that far more effort is needed to
extend protection across the region in lowland and mountain
areas if the impacts are to be minimized.

Christian Nellemann of UNEP’s GRID centre in Norway said,
"The water from this region impacts over half of the world’s
population, but less than three percent of the watersheds are
protected. Many have become deforested and overgrazed."

"Impoverished people often have to settle in the most
exposed flood-risk areas, and when the forest is gone further
upstream, the floods will hit them severely. This pattern will
be repeated annually and will worsen with more extreme climate
events unless care is taken to protect larger shares of the
watersheds," Nellemann said. "In fact we can support
development by doing so, as the floods have great economic and
health consequences."

"Local indigenous people often see their vital resources
exploited, while they benefit little from the development.
Further down river, impoverished people are also those that
are the most severely exposed to the risk of floods and
seasonal drought, as they often have to settle in flood-risk
areas," he added. "We have to speed up conservation efforts in
these watersheds to ensure safe water resources."

The report points out that many Asian rivers have already
been affected by deforestation and increased use of water for
irrigation, which has been fueled by existing infrastructure
developments.

Despite the importance of the rivers in the region, only
the Tarim has high levels of protection with around 21 percent
of its river basin in protected areas or covered by
agreements.

Cyclists explore the Tarim River Basin. Its 2,179
kilometers (1,354 miles) make the Tarim River in southern
Xinjiang province China's longest interior
river.
(Photo courtesy )

The Tarim River also has the greatest relative water
consumption for irrigation. Large areas of pristine wildlife
habitats have been laid bare because the river has run dry as
a result of demand for water for irrigation to support growing
settlements.

The rest of the area's rivers, including the Huang He or
Yellow River; the Indus; the Amu Darya; the Ganges and
Salween, have on average just 2.5 percent of their basins
protected.

While many of these rivers are critical to hundreds of
millions of people, seasonal scarcity of water is an
increasing problem as are floods as a result of land-use
changes such as deforestation and intensive agriculture.

The report argues that climate change as a result of the
burning of oil, coal and other fossil fuels is likely to
aggravate problems with water supplies.

Previous studies, carried out by UNEP, ICIMOD and others,
have pin-pointed some 50 lakes that have formed in Nepal and
Bhutan in recent years as a result of melting glaciers.

Experts are concerned that these lakes, held back by soil
and stones, could burst their banks sending torrential floods
down valleys, threatening villages and homes.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences, some of whose members
contributed to the "Fall of Water" report, says seven percent
of the country’s glaciers are vanishing annually and that, by
2050, as many as 64 percent of China’s glaciers will have
disappeared.

An estimated 300 million Chinese live in the country’s arid
west and depend on water from glaciers for their survival.

The report calculates that currently close to half of the
Asia’s mountain region is affected by infrastructure
development and that, by 2030, this could rise to over 70
percent if trends continue unchecked.

It claims that the biggest impacts will be on river
catchments and wildlife along the Karakoram highway, Pakistan,
the Indian and southern side of the Himalayas and in
southeastern Tibet and the Yunnan and Sichuan provinces of
southwestern China.

Overgrazing along road corridors in dry regions of Pakistan
and China results in erosion and landslides as well as dust
storms, the report finds.

All countries in the region are likely to see a decline in
the abundance of wildlife over the next three decades on
current trends of infrastructure development, the researchers
said.

Lowland areas may see a decline of up to 80 percent in
their historic abundance of wildlife, with perhaps as much as
a 50 percent decline compared to today for some areas,
depending on the measures taken to steer development in more
environment friendly ways.

Mountain and upland areas could witness a 20 percent to 40
percent decline in wildlife abundance with the report
expressing particular concern for the remaining fragile
populations of species like the snow leopard, the Black necked
crane and Przewalski’s gazelle.

The Whooper swan has been greatly threatened by overgrazing
in wetlands by domestic animals. The mountains are
characterized by very scattered smaller productive patches,
that become the primary targets for settlements and
development, but at great costs to wildlife and with increased
risk of organized poaching.

Many homes have been destroyed by floodwaters along
China's Huai River. (Photo by Thorir Gudmundsson
courtesy IFRC)
Some countries and their wildlife
will be more affected than others. Kazakhstan and Bhutan
currently have wildlife on 20 percent of their land affected
by infrastructure. This could rise to 30 percent by 2030 and
40 percent by 2060.

Surendra Shrestha, Director of UNEP’s Regional Office for
Asia and the Pacific, said, "Most serious is the situation in
parts of Pakistan, Northern India, Bangladesh, Myanmar and
South-East Asia, where human population pressures together
with unchecked piecemeal development to facilitate activities
such as logging can have great impacts on biodiversity and the
ability of watersheds to handle monsoon floods."

In these countries, up to 80 percent of the productive land
area may become severely impacted by development in 2030.
While this figure is only 42 percent for China by 2030, this
represents a similar impact, because Western China is
dominated by uninhabited deserts.

Ben ten Brink, of the Netherlands Environmental Assessment
Agency, says that the new model integrates many different
pressures such as climate change, development, land use and
pollution, so as to better help identify policy gaps for
politicians and managers.

"The scenario results help us visualize the possible
outcomes of different policies. Progress has been shown to be
possible, but we need much stronger investment in protecting
the water sheds and biodiversity if we are to break the tide
and the growing risk to so many people of unchecked piecemeal
development," ten Brink added.

Most importantly, he said, "We can now begin to assist
policymakers and the industry in evaluating cost-benefits of
alternative investments in environmental protection. This is a
giant leap forward in scientific based management," ten Brink
said.

"The Fall of Water: Emerging threats to the water resources
and biodiversity at the roof of the world to Asia’s lowland
from changes associated with large-scale settlement and
piecemeal development" is available at: www.globio.info and
www.grida.no and www.unep.org together with graphics and maps

Quote of
Note

"Wild beasts and birds are by right not the
property merely of people who are alive today, but the property of
unknown generations whose belongings we have no right to squander."

-- U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt

Questions or Comments: [email-masked]

To Subscribe or
Unsubscribe to ENS daily headlines: Click Here

Search
ENS

Copyright
Environment News Service (ENS) 2005. All Rights Reserved.