Tibetan plateau on agenda of UN talks: Researchers

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Dharamsala, Aug 10 (IANS) Endorsing the UN's landmark climate report on shrinking glaciers, climate researchers with the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) on Tuesday expressed hope that their homeland, the Tibetan plateau, which holds the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) ice sheet, also known as the world's Third Pole, and staring at an ecological disaster will now get global attention.

Seeing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report a wake-up call, the CTA urges world leaders to put Tibet on the global climate change agenda of the UN climate change summit named COP26, which the UK is hosting in Glasgow in November.

The Tibetan plateau has more than 46,000 glaciers and they give birth to Asia's major river systems -- the Indus, Sutlej, Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong, Yangtze, and the Yellow Rivers that provide a crucial water supply for the 240 million people who live in the region, including 86 million Indians.

The report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, compiled by 234 scientists from 64 countries, warned that the glaciers such as in the Lahaul-Spiti region of western Himalaya have been losing mass since the start of the 21st century, and if emissions do not fall, glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalaya would decline by two-thirds.

The landmark report finds that human influence is very likely the main driver of global retreat of glaciers since the 1990s and almost all of the world's glaciers have retreated since the 1950s in an unprecedented manner.

Studies conducted by the CTA administration, based in this northern Indian hill town, calls for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to recognize the global ecological importance of the Tibetan plateau and strengthen climate change research on the plateau.

The government must respect the traditional knowledge of and way of life in Tibet and regulate urbanisation and tourism in the Tibetan plateau in southwestern China.

Also the international community needs to carry forward the global climate action to bring to the fore the centrality of Tibet in all discussion on climate change.

According to the CTA, the Tibetan plateau has seen an increase in temperature of approximately 0.3 degrees Celsius in every decade.

This means that over the past 50 years the temperature has increased by 1.3 degrees Celsius, which is three times the global average, a researcher told IANS.

As a result, 82 per cent of the ice has retreated with 66 per cent of the glaciers in danger of melting by 2050.

Tibetan spiritual leader and Nobel laureate the Dalai Lama has been saying his homeland Tibet is currently vulnerable to climate change.

He has been emphasizing that "climate change is not the concern of just one or two nations. It is an issue that effects all humanity and every living being on this earth and that there is a real need for a greater sense of global responsibility based on a sense of the oneness of humanity".

According to the IPCC's latest report, mountain and polar glaciers are committed to continue melting for decades or centuries.

Not only is glacier mass loss a dominant contributor to global mean sea level rise, it may also cause low-likelihood, high-impact outcomes, characterized by deep uncertainty and sometimes involving tipping points.

In the context of the Hindu Kush Himalaya, the report says the mountain glaciers like in the Himalayas are included in the assessment and human influence is responsible for the retreat of glaciers since the 20th century, and that is not only in the two poles, but also mountain glaciers.

"Glaciers are also one of the slow responding parts of the climate system, so what we see now is not the retreat to expect from the warming we currently have. So, even if we stop emitting right now, or admit to stopping global warming at 1.5 degrees, we will see further retreat of glaciers. That is of course an important climatic impact driver, because it has huge implications for fresh water availability in the region," it says.

According to the IPCC report, compiled by 234 scientists from 64 countries, analysing over 14,000 published studies, changes that are locked in, especially increases in sea level rise and melting of glaciers or other parts of the cryosphere but this isn't the impact of current warming.

"We will only observe the impact of current warming in the decades to come. This year, we have observed some very unprecedented extreme events but we will not observe all the effects of the current warming right now but in the coming decades.

"For a country like India, some of the increase in heat waves is masked by aerosol emissions and reducing that is important for air quality."

Seeing the significance, a landmark meeting of ministers from all eight of the Hindu Kush Himalayan (HKH) countries signed an historically significant declaration in October 2020, agreeing to strengthen regional cooperation in the HKH; to promote a united voice for the HKH at regional, global and UN platforms; to enhance the uptake of scientific evidence for improving policies in the region focusing on mountain environments and livelihoods; and to assess the feasibility of establishing a regional institutional mechanism.

"The HKH mountains are hotspots of climate change and people in this region are at the frontlines of climate change impacts," Eklabya Sharma, Deputy Director General of Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), had said after the declaration.

(Vishal Gulati can be reached at vishal.g@ians.in)

--IANS

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