Hindu Kush Himalaya region ‘on front line of climate change’

By: Athar Parvaiz on December 17th, 2009

The countries of the Hindu Kush Himalayan (HKH) region have complained that despite being a climate change hotspot, they are not being taken seriously in the climate change negotiations.

Representatives of the smaller countries of the region, Afghanistan, Bhutan, Nepal and Pakistan, were speaking during a side event at the UN Climate Change Convention conference in Copenhagen. The event was organised by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD),  a regional knowledge development centre serving the eight regional member countries of the Hindu Kush-Himalayas – Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal, and Pakistan.

“The most vulnerable countries in the world are in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region, which is home to 1.3 billion people. We are facing increasing threats of floods, droughts and forest fires, and our agriculture-based economy is at huge risk”, said Nepal’s prime minister, Madhav Kumar.

Nepal stressed that the poorer countries of the region are suffering even though they have made no contribution to global warming.

“Nepal is responsible for only 0.5 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, yet it is at the receiving end of global warming”,  the prime minister said. The director general of ICIMOD,  Andreas Schild, pointed out that the HKH region contains 100 square kilometres of ice and 33,000 cubic metres of ice mass, which act as a source of water for one-third of the world’s population.

Bhutan’s agriculture minister, Pema Gyamtsho, said each country of the region faced a potentional threat from climate change. Its impact had already started taking a toll, the minister said. “Some glaciers in our country have retreated  by 200 metres. We have over 2,000 glacial lakes, of which 25 are potentially dangerous,” he said.

He stressed the need to take integrated adaptation measures in South Asia, where every country faced threats which could cause damage near at hand. “All of us need to have a common strategy. And I think we need to seal a deal at the regional level”, he said.

Mostapha Zaher, director general of Afghanistan’s National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA), said that while his country had suffered from conflict for the last 30 years, “now it faces the challenge of climate change”. He said it was a huge challenge for a poor country like Afghanistan.

“It needs high technology and huge funds to cope with such a challenge. I think the developed countries should have no problem in providing this to the least developed countries,” Zaher said.

“Afghanistan’s economy is largely based on agriculture and 80 per cent of our population depend on farming for their livelihoods. But continuous droughts are posing a serious threat to the agro-economy and food security.”

The representative from Pakistan, Dr Arshad Muhammad Khan, is also the director of the Global Change Impact Studies Centre,  a think tank set up to help national planners and decision makers in areas such as climate, water, energy, food, agriculture, health, ecology and new technologies.

He said the “most vulnerable country to the impacts of climate change is Pakistan.”  Khan said Pakistan’s entire river system depended on the Himalayan glaciers. “Pakistan’s lifeline is the Indus river system which gets 75 to 80 per cent of its water from the glaciers. But with these glaciers facing threats, our irrigation network, the world’s largest, is also exposed to danger,” he said.