India questions climate change impacts on the Himalayan Glaciers: Nepal Silent
KD SHRESTHA
On 9 November, “Himalayan Glaciers: A State-of-Art Review of Glacial Studies, Glacial Retreat and Climate Change,” a report challenging climate change’s impact on glacier retreat, was published by India’s Ministry of Environment and Forests on its website.
Produced by G.B. Pant Institute of Himalayan Environment & Development, it was authored by V.K.Raina, the former Deputy Director General of Geological Survey of India. Since then, it has become the infamous Raina Report.
While the report has only been recently published, the ‘White Paper’ had been discussed as far back as August 16, when Indian news media quoted India’s Minister of Environment and Forests (MoEF) Jairam Ramesh as having said, “The Himalayan Glaciers are in trouble. The paper finds that some are retreating, but others seem to be advancing. However, there is no robust evidence to suggest that climate change is causing the retreat.”
This recent picture of Imja Tsho Lake shows that the glacier is retreating.
Subel Bhandari
Questionable Stance:
“It would be great news if Himalayan glaciers were somehow immune to the worldwide trend. However, all the peer-reviewed science on this topic shows that they are not,” responded internationally renowned environmentalist Bill McKibben, when asked for his reaction for this column.
Indeed, the fact that the Raina Report is not peer reviewed diminishes its credibility significantly. “With the greatest of respect this guy retired years ago and I find it totally baffling that he comes out and throwing out everything that has been established years ago,” Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Nobel Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told The Guardian newspaper on November 9 about V.K Raina and his report.
In the same Guardian article by Randeep Ramesh, a baffled member of the Indian Prime Minister’s climate change council, Sunita Narain, is quoted as saying “The PM’s council has just received a comprehensive report which presents many studies which show clear fragmentation of the glaciers would lead to faster recession. I am not sure what Jairam Ramesh is doing.” She is also the Director of the New Delhi based Center for Science and Environment.
In a somewhat contradictory stand between August 16 and this month, at two public speaking events that this writer attended in New York in September, Minister Ramesh talked about India’s position on climate change and the implications climate change had on the melting Himalayan glaciers in relation to India’s massive agriculture industry.
Questionable Logic
The Raina Report is hardly the first questionable logic endorsed by India’s MoEF in recent months. In early September, India released a report that noted their carbon emissions would triple by the year 2031. However, they made it clear that per capita their carbon footprints would still remain below the global average. It seems their population size and growth rate was less of a cause for alarm than a cause of relief that it would offset their per capita carbon footprint. “We did not invent the per capita calculations,” Minister Ramesh explained during his talk programs in New York.
India’s argument implies that a country can always decrease its “per capita” carbon footprint by having a large enough population. This logic, therefore, seemingly endorses higher population, which of course is a critical problem that needs to be addressed in the conversation about causes of climate change, and models of sustainability.
All of these might seem like convenient positions to take for a country that wants to exploit its coal resources and is opposed to binding carbon emission targets at the COP15.
In this handout image of Imja Tsho Lake taken by satellite between 1962 & 2006, the glacier had melted into a four-kilometer wide lake. The Imja Glacier had retreated by upto 72 meters per year for five years according to a 2007 ICIMOD report.
ICIMOD/AFP: Reprinted with permission
Nepal’s Ironic Silence
India is not a joke; what it says matters and the positions it takes on variety of issues, climate change included, actively shapes global debates. It is true that this report in question is already diminished in its science because it is not peer reviewed, and it is diminished politically because the Indian Prime Minister’s office has distanced itself from it. Still, it is a position that is endorsed by India’s environment Minister.
By not responding to the Raina Report Nepal has demonstrated a major failure to champion one of its key positions on climate change. This failure happened most clearly at the Prime Minister’s office and the Ministry of Environment, where bureaucrats and current office holders have been globe-trotting carrying the climate change flag, and will all make their way to Copenhagen soon.
The failure happened at many other levels too. International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, the Mecca of all things related to mountain development and glacier studies in Nepal, has still not made a public statement. Speaking to an official there this week, it seems the organization is not clear on whether it will make a statement or not or to how seriously treat the Raina Report. But where were WWF and its Climate For Life campaign? What about IUCN? Where are the Everest summiteers that will be representing Nepal at COP15?
Nepal’s entire climate change campaign is based on the phenomenon’s impact on the Himalaya. The South Asian climate summit Nepal hosted in early September, Kathmandu To Copenhagen, was based on this premise. Later that month, Nepal’s Prime Minister gifted the American President Barrack Obama with a rock from Mt. Everest to highlight climate change’s impact on the mountain and the range it belongs to. In December, during COP15, a summit of mountain climbers is being planned in Copenhagen with Nepal’s active participation in putting the summit together.
For COP15, Nepal has also produced a Draft Position in its ‘Status Paper’ “prepared by a team of experts” in a consultative process that included present and former Ministers, Vice Chair and members of the National Planning Commission, high level government officials form concerned Ministries, and climate change experts and activists amongst others. In this document, there is a section called the ‘Climate Change Issues in Nepal.’ There, the document states “Visible effects of climate change in the form of the retreat of glaciers and formation of new glacial lakes and expansion of already existing glacial lakes are being witnessed at an alarming rate, mostly in the high Himalayas.”
Where is the vigilence and reponse? Where has that “team of experts” vanished? Nepal is willing to take initiative in a whole lot of gimmickry: cabinet meeting on Everest base camp, well crafted sound bytes and stories from Everest expeditions by summiteers, and so on. Nepal is also willing to accept a whole lot of money tied to climate change: $60 million from World Bank, $80 million from DFID to the government, and an X amount from various sources to numerous NGOs, INGOs and individuals. Yet, when the essence of its climate change position is being dismissed, it sits in an ironic and shameful silence.
Still, in its COP15 Position Paper it has the audacity to propose “…an alliance of countries with the most vulnerable mountain eco-system is imperative. Nepal should lobby this idea and take the lead role in forming the alliance.”
By A Logic Called Science
Nepal’s silence aside, the relationship between glacier retreat and climate change has to be addressed. And on that, various UN and peer reviewed reports have cited several sound data on global warming: the earth’s mean global surface temperature rising by 0.74C between 1906-2005, and earth’s mean annual surface air temperature having increased by 0.4- 0.6 C in the last 100 years and potentially increasing by 3 to 5C this century with North India becoming the warmest part of the country. Satellite images have shown that between 1962 – 2004 more than 1,000 Himalayan glaciers have significantly retreated. There is no question about the fact that mosquitoes have suddenly found hospitable environment in altitudes above 3,500 meters above sea level and flies now hover about at Everest Base Camp. So can global warming, which causes climate change, cause glacier retreat? As environmentalist McKibben explained to this writer: “There is, I fear, little chance of escaping the basic operations of physics: warmer temperatures melt ice.”
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India Questions Climate Change Impacts On The Himalayan Glaciers: Nepal Silent
Thanks for putting my comment. the annual increasing trend of mean temperature in Nepal is 0.06C, not 0.6C.
It is sad to note the silence to such a nice and informative article to the delegation. I congratulate Mr. KD Shrestha. I wish I had his email address so that we can exchange our views.
I am glad that Republica published this article, but at the same time feel very sad at the calmness at responsible authorities who are almost to take off for COP15 at Copenhagen.
Personally I am not at all worried about the writings of Mr. Raina and the statement of Hon´ble Minister Jairam Ramesh Just because we have ample evidence, scientific evidences.We have been in this venture on glaciers since 1974. Rikha Samba glacier,G10 glaciers among the host of others in Hidden Val
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