Friday, November 17, 2006

Tibet's Lofty Glaciers Melt Away


Tibet's Lofty Glaciers melt Away
Research by scientists shows that the ice fields on the roof of the world are disappearing faster than anyone thought.

By Clifford Coonan
Published: 17 November 2006

The Qinghai-Tibet plateau is home to tens of thousands of glaciers, fields of ice at the roof of the world where Mount Everest and other Himalayan peaks look down on China and Nepal. But the glaciers are melting faster than anyone thought, fresh research by Chinese scientists shows, as global warming speeds up the shrinkage of more than 80 per cent of the 46,377 glaciers on the lofty plateau.

Rising temperatures on the ice fields of Qinghai-Tibet and surrounding areas in the past 50 years are having a devastating effect on the environment, as receding glaciers translate into water shortages in China and huge swathes of south Asia. China will soon have to add more deserts, droughts and sandstorms to its already lengthy list of pollution woes, while India and Nepal will have to deal with staggering environmental consequences, as the melting lakes of ice threaten essential natural resources for the large population centres at the foot of the mountain ranges.

About 47 per cent of China's glaciers are on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau in the Himalayas, where the Yangtze, Yellow, Brahmaputra, Mekong and Salween rivers all originate. The rate of melting, estimated at some 7 per cent a year, has meant more water run-off from the plateau, which worsens soil erosion and leads to desertification. It is an environmental nightmare for rivers such as the Yangtze, 20 per cent of which is fed by glaciers, while the Taklamakan Desert in north-west China could be flooded before later drying out, researchers say.

Research just released by China's leading scientific body, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, shows global warming is dealing a hammer blow to ice fields at some of the world's truly awesome mountain regions. This week the United Nations warned that Tibet's glaciers could disappear within 100 years due to global warming.

"Almost all glaciers in China have already shown substantial melting," the UN Development Programme said in its 2006 Human Development Report. "This is a major threat to China's over-used and polluted water supplies. The 300 million farmers in China's arid western region are likely to see a decline in the volume of water flowing from the glaciers." The melting glaciers have not led to more water flowing into China's dry north and west because much of the melted glacier water is evaporated before it reaches the country's drought-stricken farmers, again as a result of global warming.

In the past 40 years, glaciers across the Tibetan plateau that spills from China into South Asia have shrunk by 6,600 square kilometres, especially since the 1980s, the conservation group WWF said in a 2005 report. The glaciers now cover about 105,000 square kilometres, it said. It is not just the glaciers of Tibet that are melting - 95 per cent of Alaska's glaciers are thinning, too. Global temperatures rose about 0.6C during the 20th century, and the consensus among scientists is that warming will continue as long as greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels, accumulate in the atmosphere.

China is the world's fastest-growing major economy, but it has only a quarter of the world's average water per person, and rampant economic growth has sharpened competition for water resources.The Qinghai-Tibet plateau covers 2.5 million square kilometres - about a quarter of China's land surface - at an average altitude of four kilometres above sea level. The world's highest ice fields are a natural biological museum for the array of geological phenomena they contain. The temperature has risen by 0.2C every 10 years, according to the Cold and Dry Zone Environment and Engineering Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The institute's scientists selected 5,000 glaciers in the region for study, using remote sensors and other methods for gathering geographical information, to monitor changes over the past 50 years, Liu Shiyin, one of the scientists taking part in the programme, told the Xinhua news agency.The results were harrowing. Liu said only a small number of glaciers were expanding And about 82 per cent of the monitored glaciers had receded by 4.5 per cent in the past 50 years.

The rate of shrinkage in glaciers in the central and northwestern parts of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau was slightly slower, but it was noticeably faster in neighbouring areas. Of 170 glaciers on the northwestern slope of the Qilian Mountains, a range of peaks in the northern province of Gansu formerly known as the Richthofen Range, 95 per cent had thinned by 4.9 metres each year on average. Only 10 glaciers had expanded during the period. In the Tianshan Mountains in Xinjiang province, almost all the glaciers on the northern slopes, and 69 per cent of glaciers on the southern slopes, were dwindling.

In the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia, site of the 72km long Fedchenko Glacier, the world's longest ice field outside the polar region, the glacier acreage shrank by 10 per cent. Glaciers on the northern slopes of the Kunlun Mountains, which stretch for 3,000km to form the border of Northern Tibet, are shrinking, as are the ice fields of the Himalayas, which are home to the world's tallest mountain, Mount Everest.

Global warming is causing China's highland glaciers, including those covering Everest, to shrink by an amount equivalent to all the water in the Yellow River every year. Monitoring results show the flow of water in some rivers in north-west China's dry regions has been increasing, which was possibly a result of melting glaciers, Liu said. Liu warned that if glaciers continued to melt at such a high rate, it "would impose serious impact on local production and the life of local people". In Nepal, where temperatures rise an average of 0.06C per year, snow-fed rivers are declining, and water levels are getting lower on the wetlands of the Qinghai Plateau. Melting icefields are expected to trigger more droughts in an already parched China, expand desertification and increase the frequency of sandstorms.

More at the link.
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And those sandstorms are already increasing in intensity and occurence:

Bejing Is Covered In Dust

Sandstorms Effect Air Quality in Bejing

China MUST join the world in curbing its emissions of fossil fuels. 300 million people in these arid lands depend on the rivers that are made up of approximately 20% of the glaciers that are now melting at an alarming rate. And without water, there is no food, and there is no life.

Also see:

Frozen Soil Thawing Faster Endangering Qinghai-Tibet Railway

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Clean Water Is A Human Right

Clean Water Is A Human Right

Clean water is a human right
Kevin Watkins / International Herald Tribune
Published: November 10, 2006

NAIROBI: Vivian Neyamba, aged six months, just became another grim statistic in the world's most lethal and least reported humanitarian disaster. She lost her life not to a drought, a flood or a violent conflict, but to a killer that claims the lives of 500 children across the world each day - diarrhea caused by a global crisis in water and sanitation.

I have been following these issues for years. But standing outside the tiny corrugated iron shack in the sprawling slum of Kibera in Nairobi, where Vivian Neyamba lived her short life, I got a heartbreaking glimpse into what it actually means to live without clean water and basic sanitation.

In a slum of more than half a million people, the largest informal settlement in Africa, almost no one has a tap in their home. At dawn, armies of women and young girls line up with buckets to buy water at roadside standpipes from private vendors. On a bad day, they have to wait more than an hour, or go without.

You can smell the sanitation crisis in the air. Kibera is a toilet-free zone. Lacking any alternative, people defecate into plastic bags which are thrown into ditches. Raw sewage is everywhere. It is in the noxious black liquid that floods through people's homes when it rains, in the refuse heaps that children play in, and in the dusty lanes that pass for streets.

It is also in the water that people drink. Fractured pipes carrying water from the mains to the standpipes suck in raw sewage. "That is why our children get sick," says Margaret Olewoch, a birth attendant who has lived in Kibera for 20 years, pointing to a leaking pipe. "The water here is dangerous."

Not everyone in southern Nairobi faces a daily water crisis. Cross Ngang Road, which marks the northern perimeter of the slum, and you enter a different water world. Here the water sprinklers of the Royal Nairobi Golf Club work overtime to keep the greens in a condition to which the city's business elite and diplomatic corps are accustomed.

Back on the other side of Ngang Road, water kills children. Typhoid and dysentery are rampant, with child death rates running at almost four times the average for Nairobi. The slums of Kibera are a microcosm of one of the greatest development challenges of the 21st century. More than a billion people today lack clean water. About 2.6 billion - half of the developing world's population - lack access to sanitation.

These twin deficits inflict enormous human, social and economic costs. Unclean water is the second biggest killer of children, claiming more than two million lives annually. Diseases caused by water keep countless millions more children out of school, reinforce poverty, and act as a brake on economic growth. They cost African countries about 5 percent of their gross domestic product - equivalent to what the region receives in aid. Under the Millennium Development Goals, governments have pledged to halve by 2015 the proportion of people without access to water and sanitation. But at the rate we are going, this crucial goal will be missed.

The governance of water markets is at the heart of the problem. All too often, the poorer you are, the more you pay. Municipal water utilities provide cheap water, usually heavily subsidized, to industry and high-income suburbs, while people living in slums rely on a complex web of intermediaries such as tanker-truck operators and water vendors.

You can see the results in Nairobi. People living in the slums of Kibera pay five times more for their water than the Royal Nairobi Golf Club. In fact, they pay more per liter than people living in New York or London. From Manila, to Mumbai and Jamaica, the same story applies in slums across the world. So what can be done to tackle the global crisis in water and sanitation?

Continued at the link above.
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The Human Right To Water
Very comprehensive report from seven years ago that is still relevant today.

My comments:

Access to resources that sustain life and maintain health are a human right under international law. Water is a resource that sustains life from the time of being a fetus in the womb. Without water there would be no food to sustain us, nor to provide us with safe and adequate sanitation facilities that guard against diseases that cause illness and death.

I believe for any community or country to deny such a right to its people is a human rights abuse that should be punishable under that law. Of course however, there are groups that do not wish for water to be declared a universal human right. Those governments that use water as a political weapon or as a way to divert it to richer areas are only two groups of people as well as corporations that would be prone to oversight and fines for violating the human rights of indigenous people on the lands they take water from to make a profit.

They will claim water should not be declared a human right as to avert wars, but in essence it is the quality, lack of and scarcity of water resulting from higher prices, lower quality, lack of moral will in bringing sensible water management and education to underdeveloped countries, diversion, privitization, dams, and environmental policies that cause drought and deforestation that actually lead to the wars. People can and have always come to agreements among themselves. It is only when governments and other entities with ulterior motives get in between for their own benefit that you see problems begin.

World Water Forum Did Not Declare Clean Water To Be A Human Right

Look to the WORLD BANK to also see why this declaration will not happen. The World Bank actually pushes for privitization of water behind their compassionate facade.

World Bank And WTO/ Corporate Control Of Water/Dr. Vandana Shiva

There are thousands of Vivian Neyambas in this world, and they all die early senseless deaths that could be prevented if their fellow humans had the slightest bit of morality above the insensitivity and ignorance that prevails in a world gone mad with greed. What price do you place on a human life?

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Water Clash Evoked By Climate Talks


Water Clash Evoked By Climate Talks
Water Clash Warning Evoked by Kenya Climate Talks
KENYA: November 14, 2006

NAIROBI - Global climate change talks in Nairobi this week may be nowhere more relevant than a nearby settlement where water shortages a year ago sparked clashes which saw 25 people speared, clubbed or chopped to death.

Masai herdsmen and settled farmers say the rains have changed on the flat plains that spread uninterrupted between distant mountains in Kenya's Rift Valley. And a year ago drought lit the touch paper to old rivalries over who owns what land, triggering a pitched battle between two sides wielding machetes, arrows, spears and clubs.

"It's the first time water was the cause," said Zacharia Igeria, chief administrator in the 50,000-strong community of the Maai Mahiu region some 50 km (30 miles) from Nairobi.
Drought last year shrank the river Ewasu Kidong, which is Masai for "water jug", to exceptionally low levels, Igeria said.

Water and pasture shortages in the past three years have decimated Masai cattle herds by four-fifths, the herdsmen say. The dwindling of the vital local river coupled with farmers' plans to divert its waters to irrigate cash crops sparked the conflict 12 months ago, Igeria said.
Disrupted rain cycles are the type of weather changes many scientists predict will become more frequent as a result of climate change, as mankind releases heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.

Deforestation has also been blamed for more frequent droughts in Africa. Elders of the local Masai had never heard of global warming nor the UN climate change conference less than two hour's drive away in Nairobi, but wanted to give a message to the 70-plus environment ministers descending on the capital.

"We're not educated, we're not aware of climate change," local Masai elder William Sayo told Reuters and local journalists. "We need help from you to explain how we can live according to the climate. Come and teach us about what is happening."

More at the link.
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The bolded sentence above is exactly the crux of this problem worldwide. Ignorance about the real effects of climate change and the inability to or lack of will to get this information to people who need it and to teach them how to mitigate it is simply unacceptable. People should not have to die to get water. We should not be killing each other for it. We have what we need to provide water to EVERYONE IN THIS WORLD. What we need to do is take it upon ourselves to become educators.

I think that like the Peace Corps, we need a Sustainability Corps that travels the world to offer education, tools, and hope to people in areas of the world like Kenya in order to assist them in taking action to protect and conserve their natural resources. And we must also take into account that for many in this world water is a sacred fluid, and not having rain is seen as a sign from God. They cannot understand the scientific facts behind climate change, nor do they have many of the skills and tools necessary to harvest rainwater that they may get. And I ask , why not?

It is unconscienable that people of this world should thirst for knowledge as well as water and not have it given to them, especially regarding a situation that is a matter of life and death.

See:
African Conservation Foundation

Water Scarcity Major Crisis Facing Africa

Another World Water Day Gone

We see another World Water Day pass us by. The theme, Water For All, signifies that though some progress has been made we are woefully behin...