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Security in a drier age (1)

Scott Moore — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:18:00 +0000

Climate change poses new – and serious – barriers to China’s plans for stable development. In the first segment of a three-part article, Scott Moore says water will top the agenda.

Outside analysts have long stressed that climate change threatens China’s basic national interests. The Chinese government has come to embrace a similar rationale, as a result moving towards aggressive efforts to limit the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions.

In August 2009, China’s cabinet, the Standing Committee of the State Council, announced that China would seek to control its greenhouse-gas emissions even as it continues its economic development. Climate change, the council affirmed, threatens the country’s development by increasing extreme-weather events and exacerbating water shortages. As a result, China will set itself on a path towards low-carbon economic growth, stabilising emissions within the next few decades.

This announcement, perhaps more clearly than any previous statement, illustrates the growing trend in China towards viewing climate change as a direct threat to the country’s development objectives. It is clear that a number of factors, including economic interests and international political pressure, frame the Chinese government’s position on climate change. Nonetheless, given Beijing’s attention at the highest levels to the strategic implications of climate change, it is vital to understand how it may affect the country’s fundamental interests.

At the heart of these challenges to China’s future are changes in the quantity and distribution of water resources throughout the country and its neighbours. Droughts and flooding are expected to become more severe in many areas and the melting of Himalayan glaciers to lead to steep, long-term declines in water availability in several areas of China and south Asia. Moreover, because of these changes, most major river systems are likely to experience increased variability in water flow, making it harder for farmers and other users to predict water supply. Other interlinked processes, such as desertification in northern China and saltwater intrusion in low-lying coastal areas, pose further challenges to food production and ecosystems.

These changes in water availability have important implications for the Chinese government’s objectives both at home and abroad. China already has contentious relations with its neighbours over many transboundary water resources, especially the Mekong River. As these resources shift and, in many cases, dwindle under climate change, China will have to become increasingly adept at dealing with transboundary water issues. Moreover, melting glaciers and shrinking snow packs portend severe water shortages in fragile border regions like northern Pakistan. Such spectres are of great concern to Beijing as it pursues its policy of “peaceful rise”.

Domestically too, water-resource changes threaten China’s vision of stable and orderly economic development. Its restive western areas, including Xinjiang and Tibet, are expected to suffer most from declining water resources. Already poor and underdeveloped, these regions could experience rising inter-ethnic tension over the distribution of water or become a source of growing environmental out-migration as water-stressed inhabitants seek better opportunities elsewhere. Such migration has been documented in several parts of western China and identified by environmental security scholars as a key risk factor for environmental conflict.

These implications indicate that climate change will increasingly bear on China’s strategic ambitions and priorities, forcing the revision of some. Three themes are particularly relevant for policymaking. First, climate-change impacts are defined primarily by the uncertainty that they introduce; it is difficult to plan large-scale development objectives, for example, without being able to count on stable water resources. Second, it is clear that regional climate change impacts will be more acute in some places, like north-western China, than in others. Third and finally, there will be a growing opportunity cost, in terms of financial, administrative and other resources, to adapting to climate change. For a developing country like China, this opportunity cost is of no small concern.

The eastern portion of the Asian landmass faces particularly acute changes in water availability and distribution as a result of climate change. Many Asian nations are already under water stress, and the Asian continent has the lowest per-capita water allocation of any continent save Antarctica.

In northern China, the water use-to-availability ratio was three to four times the level in the south as of the year 2000. In China and its immediate neighbourhood, climate change threatens to exacerbate this already tenuous water situation in several ways.

China’s National Climate Change Program asserts that “Climate change has already caused changes [in] water resources distribution over China,” focussing on an increase in “hydrological extreme events”, such as drought in the north and flooding in the south. This assessment draws largely from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) data indicating an observed increase in precipitation in north and north-eastern China and a marked increase in the Yangtze River delta region and the south-east.

Researchers stress that, as a result of climate change, precipitation is decreasing in eastern China’s agricultural areas, with drought-related agricultural losses increasing steadily since the mid-twentieth century. Soil degradation as a result of climate change is further expected to increase the possibility of “disastrous drought and floods” in central, south-western and north-eastern China.

A tendency towards more extreme climate events is also predicted for other regions surrounding China. A major study of the Indian Himalayas found that climate change will increase the variation of seasonal flows significantly. In the Mekong basin, south-east Asia’s most important river system, maximum monthly water flows are expected by the IPCC to increase by 35% to 41% by mid-to-late century over twentieth century levels, while the minimum monthly water flows are expected to decline by 17% to 24%. Such increased variation threatens to disrupt normal economic and agricultural activity in vulnerable regions. In the case of the Mekong, this variability is enhanced by additional risks from sea-level rise and resulting saltwater intrusion, which pose a profound threat to agricultural production in the river’s delta region.

Potentially even more serious, however, is a predicted long-term decline in water availability as Himalayan glaciers melt and snow packs are reduced in size. The IPCC estimates that a decrease in Himalayan glacier mass of about 25% is possible by 2050 as global temperatures rise. This is significant as glacial meltwater accounts for some 70% of summer flow in the Ganges River system and 50% to 60% of the flow in other major Asian river systems. One major study predicted that the flow of Himalayan-melt fed water systems will peak by 2050 to 2070, with mean annual flow declining thereafter by between one-fifth and one-third. The consensus of modelling studies is that a significant portion of north-west China and northern India will be subject to declining water availability by the end of the century as seasonal water shortages arrive abruptly, “going from plenty to want in perhaps a few decades”.

Nonetheless, there is likely to be substantial regional variability in these effects. Some river basins are likely to be particularly affected; the Tarim River for instance, Xinjiang’s most important river system, depends on glacial meltwater for 40% of its mean annual flow. Other areas of north-western China are likely to be severely impacted by changes in water availability. As the IPCC has reported, “The duration of seasonal snow cover in [Chinese] alpine areas – namely the Tibet Plateau, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia – is expected to shorten, leading to a decline in volume and resulting in severe spring droughts.” Changes of similar magnitude are predicted for major river systems elsewhere in China and Asia.

Water distribution patterns will become much more variable. Many areas of China are likely to have too much water when they don’t need it – namely, flooding during the rainy season – and too little when they do, during the dry summer months. Certain areas, such as north and north-western China and the Mekong River system, will be impacted more, and by a greater combination of factors, than others. This conclusion has important implications for both China’s national and regional security.

Scott Moore is a graduate student at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute and previously held a Fulbright Fellowship at the College of Environmental Science and Engineering, Peking University.

An earlier version of this article was published in China Security in 2009 as “Climate Change, Water, and China’s National Interest”, Vol.5, No.3. It is used here with permission.

NEXT: The need for diplomacy

Homepage image from Greenpeace

Asian water wrangles

Michael Renner — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:04:00 +0000

Pollution and water scarcity threaten livelihoods in central-south Asia. But, argues Michael Renner, international efforts could help to forge a solution.

The quantity and quality of available water play a crucial role in the politics of central-south Asia. Access to clean drinking water is a major, though largely unmet, objective and poor management lies at the heart of many problems.

Many areas are already experiencing physical water shortages – recent studies estimate per capita water availability in the densely-populated Indus basin at around 1,000 cubic metres per year – and climate change will only exacerbate this.

The region’s water challenges do not inevitably lead to armed conflict. Unalleviated, however, they threaten to undermine human security and bring different communities into dispute. Cooperative approaches have been sparse and institutional structures remain fragmented. Yet cooperation will be critical for the region to meet its water challenges in the years and decades ahead.

In Afghanistan, the livelihoods of at least 80% of the population are based on agriculture and related occupations. The fertile plains of the Amu Darya basin, account for about 40% of Afghanistan’s irrigated lands. But poorly constructed canals translate into water losses as high as 70%. And droughts and dry years since 1999 have substantially reduced cultivated areas in the south and east.

Moreover, three decades of armed conflict have displaced a large portion of the population, impeded access to farmland, and destroyed irrigation systems. Buffeted by recurring drought and floods, and the population’s desperate coping strategies, the net result has been a severe degradation of Afghanistan’s natural environment and its water and farming infrastructure. According to Oxfam UK, overall agricultural produce has fallen by half in recent years and the loss of rural livelihoods has triggered migration to cities.

Millions of Afghans are either seasonally or chronically food insecure. As well as hunger, these desperate conditions have triggered local conflicts. Water contamination has become a severe public health threat, owing to poor waste management practices and a lack of modern sanitation; a 2003 United Nations assessment concluded no more than 12 to 23% of Afghanistan’s urban population has access to safe water.

In the wider region, the nations sharing the Amu Darya are locked into seemingly irreconcilable sets of interests. Tajikistan and Afghanistan look to the Amu Darya for hydropower as well as irrigation while Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan depend heavily on the river to irrigate their cotton, rice, and wheat fields.

Downstream, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan have similar economic interests, yet their relationship is nonetheless conflictive. Tensions over shared irrigation systems near Tuyamuyun Reservoir could be further inflamed by Turkmenistan's plans to build an artificial lake in the Karakum desert by 2010.

Upstream, Tajikistan releases reservoir water in the winter months to generate hydropower for heating, frequently causing downstream flooding and damage to infrastructure. In the summer months, it builds up its reservoirs — at precisely the time when the irrigation needs of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are most acute.

All these countries plan to increase water extraction, which may exacerbate tensions. Tajikistani plans to complete unfinished Soviet-era hydropower projects on the Vakhsh River, for example, are worrying Uzbekistan, not only because of the potential impact on summer irrigation water flows, but also because it stands to lose income (and leverage) from selling natural gas to its neighbour.

In Pakistan and India, extensive irrigation is also placing Indus basin water resources under heavy stress, with about 90% of the available flow utilised. Overpumping and inefficient irrigation techniques have led to sharply declining groundwater levels, loss of wetlands and salinisation of agricultural lands. Future sea-level rise will place coastal areas at increasing risk of inundation and water availability will decline dramatically as a result of climate change and population growth; Pakistan’s per capita water availability is forecast to fall to a critically low level of just 800 cubic metres annually by 2020.

Already, an estimated 40 million to 55 million Pakistanis do not have access to safe drinking water, yet the government spends 47 times as much on the military budget as on water and sanitation. According to a Unesco report, only 2% of Pakistan’s cities have wastewater treatment facilities and less than 30% of wastewater receives treatment in these cities. Water pollution is the leading cause of death in Pakistan.

Rising water demand in the region is causing trans-border issues as well as internal conflicts. Pakistan has an important agreement with India, the 1960 Indus Water Treaty, which divides the waters of the Indus and its eastern tributaries. However, a number of contentious projects undertaken by India in Kashmir — including the Baglihar Hydroelecric Dam, the Kishanganga Hydroelectric project and the Tulbul Navigation project — have served as reminders that water disputes between the two neighbours are never far from the surface. It is increasingly important for India and Pakistan to improve their water management and ensure diplomacy, rather than threat of force, governs water relations.

Climate change will dramatically raise the challenges in central and south Asia. By the middle of the century, increasing temperatures and growing water stress may lead to a 30% reduction in crop yields. In central Asia, reduced rainfall and runoff will cause increased heat stress, drought and desertification and lead to increasing migration. Yet no mitigation and adaptation strategies are in place.

The melting of the Hindu Kush-Karakorum-Himalaya glaciers will also have serious consequences for hundreds of millions of people. The warming trend in these mountain ranges has been much greater than the global average and two thirds of the Himalayan glaciers are reported to be shrinking. Over time, this will reduce downstream runoff and compromise hydropower generation, decreasing production of foodstuffs and commodities like cotton. In turn, this may increase poverty and social disparities.

Significant changes to monsoon patterns are also expected. Much of south, east, and south-east Asia may see increased intensity of these storms by the century’s end, while most parts of Pakistan and south-eastern Afghanistan are expected to see a 20% reduction in rainfall. Destructive storm surges and greater salt-water intrusion in low-lying coastal areas could drive migration from urban centres such as Karachi and flooding is expected to increase across the Himalayas, as well as northern Pakistan and India.

International donor support is needed to fund infrastructure maintenance, improvements in water efficiency, and diversification toward more drought-resistant crops, in part by reprioritising existing funds. In Afghanistan, for instance, Oxfam observes that donors have spent less than US$300 million to $400 million directly on agricultural projects over the last six years – a fraction of overall assistance to the country.

The governance system for central Asia’s water that emerged in the post-Soviet era remains largely dysfunctional, limited by conflicting interests, mutual suspicions and a reluctance to cooperate. However, the UN Economic Commission for Europe has intensified its engagement in central Asia over the past few years, with a programme to strengthen cooperation among members. Its Water Convention also provides a legal framework for trans-boundary water cooperation, though Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are so far the only regional signatories. Other organisations, including the Environment and Security Initiative and the East-West Institute are also running programmes to boost regional collaboration.

As great as the challenges are, there are multiple avenues for addressing them. One of the most pressing needs is greater efficiency in water use. By 2015, Afghanistan’s Ministry of Energy and Water hopes to boost efficiency by 45%, while improvements in yields for rain-fed cereal crops in Pakistan could help relieve overall water pressures. Their neighbours can and must similarly boost water productivity. Better watershed management, rainwater harvesting, urban water conservation, investments in sanitation, and more integrated planning are vitally important.

The countries of the region have little influence over global greenhouse emissions trajectories, and hence will need to focus principally on adaptation measures. It is essential to build environmental, social, economic, and political resilience, as well as improve institutional capacities to cope with growing water scarcity and climate impacts. Water cooperation across national boundaries offers important benefits but may not be realised without disinterested, innovative third-party facilitation.

Michael Renner is a senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, DC and senior advisor to the Institute for Environmental Security in Brussels.

A full version of this report was first published by the Norwegian Peacebuilding Centre.

Homepage image from IRIN

Charting unknown waters

Navin Singh Khadka — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:44:00 +0000

The behaviour of Himalayan glaciers is beset with uncertainty but the region’s water availability remains a critical issue. Navin Singh Khadka reports.

In the wake of the recent controversy over the retreat of Himalayan glaciers, in which the United Nations' climate-science body admitted that it was an error to assert that they would disappear by 2035, water availability has emerged as a key issue with even more uncertainty. Receding Himalayan glaciers grabbed headlines because they feed major rivers in south Asia and some parts of south-east Asia, which is home to a sizeable proportion of the planet's population. If the glaciers significantly retreated or even disappeared, it would be an issue of life and death for many millions of people who depend on these rivers.

But now that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said that it was a mistake to say the glaciers will be gone in a matter of decades, does that mean water is not a worrying issue any more? Many scientists believe it is even more worrying given the uncertainty surrounding the future impacts of climate change in a region not only of high population, but also of high population growth.

The broad consensus is that glaciers themselves are indeed retreating, although the rate of the recession may be debatable. However, there are other climate-influenced factors that affect river flows, such as changes in precipitation, snowfall and regional temperature. “There has been too much focus on glaciers whereas there are other factors like precipitation and snowfall that affect the levels of waters in rivers downstream the eastern Himalayas,” says Mats Eriksson, a senior hydrologist with the Nepal-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), which has carried out several studies on the glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalayas.

Below the eastern part of the Himalayas are major rivers like the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, as well as their tributaries. These are vital lifelines for millions of people in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet. A recent study for the World Bank has shown that the volume of water resulting from glacial melt in Nepal makes up less than 5% of the flow of rivers leaving the country and contributing to the Ganges downstream. “That is, about 95% or more of the river flow is the result of rain and melting seasonal snow,” says the report’s co-author, Richard Armstrong, a glaciologist from the University of Colorado at Boulder in the United States.

If that is true, rivers downstream of the eastern Himalayas will hardly be affected, even if the glaciers recede or disappear. However, would the other contributing factors to the rivers’ flow, such as precipitation and snowfall, remain the same in the changing climate? No, say scientists, but whether that will lead to rise or fall of river levels – and by how much and when – are the questions still waiting to be answered.

“We are seeing some changes in the monsoon,” Eriksson says of the seasonal precipitation system that shapes the climate in this part of the region. “Last year, for example, the monsoon arrived one month late in Nepal and then some places saw 80 millimetres of water in a day during the delayed rainy season. But there has been no consistent measurement of precipitation and temperature and there is a lack of proper studies.”

Some scientists believe absorption of solar radiation by aerosols (dust particles and carbon soots) can heat the atmosphere and accelerate regional impacts of global warming, which in turn affect water resources. William Lau, who heads the atmospheric sciences branch at US space agency NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, carried out a study in India last year and found that, as a result of aerosols, regional temperature was rising much faster than expected. And that, he said, could influence the monsoon systems, resulting in less water availability in the region.

But Armstrong says a warming climate could also mean a stronger monsoon bringing more precipitation that could increase stream flows. “Having said that, it should be noted that future precipitation patterns predicted by climate models are highly variable and there is a very little regional agreement among the models,” he says.

High variability is also an issue with the flow of rivers in the western Himalayas that do not fall within the monsoon regime. “There is no clear-cut signal as there is a large variation between average annual flows,” says Arshad Muhammad Khan, a physicist who heads the Global Change Impact Studies Centre in Pakistan. “For example, in the Indus River, the maximum flow is twice that of the minimum.” Unlike the Ganges, rivers like the Indus in the western part of the Himalayas are heavily dependent on glaciers, as this region does not get monsoon rains. But even here, glacial status is not reported to be uniform.

Some scientists say increasing temperature has meant that glaciers don't get enough snowfall during winter and therefore river flow during summer is dwindling. “We have seen the decline in the flow of the Indus, Chenab and Jhelum rivers,” says professor Mohammad Sultan Bhat of Kashmir University, who has conducted field studies with India's flood and irrigation department. “We have recorded a decrease of 40% in the flow of Jhelum's tributary river … that is fed by the receding Kolahi glacier.” But Kenneth Hewitt, a glaciologist from Canada who has been doing field studies in Pakistan's Karakoram mountains, told BBC News last October that he had seen at least half a dozen glaciers there advancing since he saw them five years ago.

With glaciers offering such complex pictures, combined with increasingly complicated precipitation and temperature patterns, the region's river systems that depend on all these factors cannot be simpler. Politics and geography, experts say, have made understanding the situation even more difficult. “Some countries in the region are not willing to share water-related data because they regard it as confidential,” says Eriksson of ICIMOD. “Since it is difficult to access them, proper studies on water availability remain a major challenge.”

Navin Singh Khadka is a journalist with the BBC Nepali service. He has a sustained interest in environment, with a focus on climate change vis-a-vis Himalayan ecology.

An earlier version of this report appeared on the BBC on January 27, 2010.

Homepage image by James C Farmer

Time for a plan

Qin Xuan — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:56:00 +0000

Months of friendly discussion between China and the west went up in smoke at Copenhagen. Qin Xuan argues that a new diplomacy is needed to avoid a repeat performance.

The most valuable lesson to be learned from the climate change conference in Copenhagen is this: the aims of global governance are unlikely to be met while the diplomatic strategies of China and emerging economies remain unsettled.

Unlike World Trade Organisation talks, the aim of climate negotiations is not only bilateral or multilateral deals between individual governments, but also direct participation in global action. The outcome of the meeting is a marker of the United Nations' ability to handle global climate governance. But the Copenhagen talks failed to reach consensus, even on matters of principle. Some of the nations involved in the process have decisive influence, but are not yet clear on what their own targets and role in international affairs actually are.

After Copenhagen, opinion in the European Union and United States quickly turned against China. A report by British journalist Mark Lynas in the Guardian newspaper claiming China had wrecked the conference and a similar article by UK climate change secretary Ed Miliband caused an outcry in China. In response to these international misgivings, the country’s official news agency Xinhua published the inside story of premier Wen Jiabao’s experiences during his 60 hours at the conference.

To understand the fierce response from China, we need to look back at the diplomatic programme the country engaged in with both the United States and European Union in the year-long run-up to Copenhagen. A strong basis of trust appeared to have been built up with both America and Europe through diplomatic activity under the auspices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs (CPIFA) and the National People’s Congress. This makes the problems at Copenhagen all the more surprising.

At the start of 2009, during the early days of president Barack Obama’s administration, US think-tanks the Brookings Institution and the Asia Society proposed a “Group of Two” (G2) relationship between China and the United States. The G2 framework would operate outside of the United Nations; the two countries would establish standards, which would subsequently be widened to the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), then the European Union and, finally, other developing nations.

Hillary Clinton visited China to lobby for closer cooperation between the two countries, and the State Council became the channel for establishing a new relationship between the White House and China. The G2 idea was not embraced but China and the United States did engage in cooperative discussion on energy and the environment. Some academics privately say they believe China hopes to use such partnerships with the United States to win support for adjustments to China’s economic and energy structure.

US climate change envoy Todd Stern paid a number of visits to China in 2009. In May, speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi also paid a rare visit to China, and several months later Wu Bangguo, head of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, visited the United States and met with representatives of the Senate energy panel.

While China was talking to the United States, it was also engaging in brisk diplomacy with the United Kingdom and European Union. Former British prime minister Tony Blair paid a number of visits to China at the invitation of the CPIFA, witnessing the efforts being made to reduce emissions in undeveloped regions such as Guizhou in the south-west and Ningxia in the north. Blair’s comments on his return, combined with Ed Miliband’s optimistic predictions on China’s stance in the run-up to Copenhagen, give us reason to believe that the European Union was, at least prior to the release of emissions targets, supportive of China’s efforts.

China’s diplomacy with the other countries in the “BASIC” group – Brazil, South Africa, India and China – is also worthy of note. Over the space of more than a year, these four nations have met after every set of climate change negotiations in a bid to maintain a consensus.

So what happened at Copenhagen? A Xinhua article published on December 25th asserts that Wen was excluded from various “clandestine negotiations”, including a meeting of several countries’ leaders held by the United States after dinner on the 17th, which “triggered strong discontent”.

Wen did not attend the meetings of national leaders on the morning or afternoon of December 18. In the morning, vice minister of foreign affairs, He Yafei, attended in his place. And, after a meeting with US president Obama at noon, Yu Qingtai – deputy head of the delegation and a lower level official – took part in the discussions. This provoked speculation and debate and the content of the Xinhua article explains why China was unhappy with closed-door meetings. But, if the article is accurate, it may be worth asking why trust between China and the United States and European Union was so weak that they were unable to work together after a full year of discussion.

During the first week of the conference, the Group of 77 (G77), a loose coalition of 130 developing countries, including China, reached a consensus over three evenings of talks – something rarely seen in recent years. The value of maintaining that consensus lay in upholding the principle of a two-track negotiation system, stressing the classification of nations as developing or developed and finding a new agreement based on “common but differentiated responsibilities”. If lines had instead been drawn between major economic groups and poor nations, the game would have become one played between the Group of 20 (G20) major economies and certain developing nations – and the logical result of that would have been, at the very least, some changes to the two-track system.

But, at the end of the conference, a split appeared between the least developed nations and the major developing economies of the G77 – to an extent this was inevitable given the shifting global order. This change in alignments most affects the BASIC nations, because they are both members of the G20 and developing nations. If the principle is accepted that major economies should take on bigger duties in regard to cutting carbon emissions, there will then be no difference between the BASIC group and developed countries.

I returned from Copenhagen on the same flight as the Chinese delegation. Having spoken to its members, I believe the next UN climate change meeting in Mexico may help to strengthen relations between the BASIC nations, the G77 and China. But the crucial factor in this is whether or not the promised EU and US aid appears.

Zhang Haibin, a specialist in environmental diplomacy at Peking University, believes China faces a number of difficult issues in the wake of Copenhagen. First, he says, the international pressure on China is continuing to grow, and its status as a developing nation becoming less clear. China believes its emissions targets are very ambitious, but the international response to these has not been what it hoped for. China is a major emitter and an economic power; the world’s expectations are increasing, as are China’s responsibilities.

Second, developed nations are becoming more closely aligned, while developing nations are diverging. Maintaining unity within the developing world is an increasingly difficult task. Third, China finds itself at the centre stage of the international community and at the heart of the conflict. Its room for manoeuvre is shrinking and its diplomatic policies and strategies facing ever greater challenges.

Fourth, doubts have been raised over the United Nations’ role in nuclear non-proliferation, global finance and climate change – a major challenge to China’s multilateral diplomacy.

Solving these issues will mean changes to China’s diplomatic strategy. These changes will be determined by two factors. At the international level, China needs to adjust its stance in step with other interest groups – and Copenhagen may promote this. Domestically, China’s leaders need to analyse and coordinate different interests in order to further stabilise domestic policy.

Ultimately, I believe that China should form a twenty-first-century diplomatic strategy to deal with climate change. At the core of this strategy will be this question: what costs is China willing to bear to meet regional and global diplomatic responsibilities?

Until those strategic changes have been made, it is hard to imagine there will be any progress in climate-change negotiations.

Qin Xuan is a reporter at Southern Metropolis Daily.

Homepage image from the White House

Understanding glacier changes (1)

Kenneth Hewitt — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:25:00 +0000

Reports about the melting – and advancing – of Himalayan glaciers have sparked heated debate. In the first section of a three-part article, Kenneth Hewitt warns against oversimplification.

[Download Kenneth Hewitt's full report here]

Glaciers are quite sensitive to climate change and, recently, there have been many reports of major changes in the Himalaya and other parts of High Asia; mostly of glaciers retreating fast. Impacts of a range of glacier hazards, and on the reliability of water resources, are of concern at local, national and transnational scales. However, there is also a growing recognition that glacial conditions in the region are very diverse, and so are their responses to climate change.

There are some very different implications in different societal contexts, not least in relation to rapid socio-economic changes, water resource projects and security crises. The latter are often more urgent or immediate problems that disrupt or undermine peoples’ capacities to adapt to environmental change. Such complexities are the focus of this article. The reality of climate change is not questioned, but some recent oversimplifications are, and claims about a narrow range of glacier hazards. In particular, unresolved problems of understanding high altitude glaciers and climate are emphasised, and the inadequacies of available information and monitoring. Recent evidence of glacier advances in the Karakoram Himalaya, and the author’s work there, illustrate many of these complexities.

Ablation zone conditions where annual ice losses are high: dust, dirt and scattered debris areas on Kaberi-Kondus Glacier, late June, at 4,000 metres above sea level. (Photograph/Kenneth Hewitt 1998)

Globally, most glaciers are reported to be diminishing more or less rapidly. Reports of “disappearing glaciers” have come from many parts of High Asia. However, this is not the case in the upper Indus and upper Yarkand River basins. Here, the glaciers have been holding their own for several decades and recently, in the Karakoram Himalaya, many have started thickening and advancing. Not only is this opposite to the broader picture for Eurasian glaciers, but also to what had been happening to Karakoram glaciers. Through most of the twentieth century they too diminished and retreated. There is no question that today’s behaviour is a regionally distinct response to climate change. It may sound like good news, given the dominant lament for the loss of glaciers, but that too would be misleading. Advancing glaciers bring dangers as well.

The surge of the Maedan tributary of Panmah Glacier. Notice severe crevassing of ice. (Photograph/Kenneth Hewitt, June 2005)

Of immediate concern are a number of glaciers on the Indus and Yarkand Rivers, whose past advances gave rise to large ice dams and catastrophic outburst floods. In the longer term, existing and planned water resource uses, dependent on glacier-fed streams or at risk from glacial floods and sedimentation, are of major concern. However, the largest challenges stem from inadequate information and monitoring, and limited scientific understanding of these high elevation glaciers. Misleading or exaggerated reports based on assumption rather than evidence are also a problem. Some high profile reports have suggested that the Indus basin is in imminent danger of losing its glaciers. Glacier hazards, notably “dangerous lakes” associated with retreating ice in other regions, have been assumed to be equally present in the Karakoram. The reports are simply wrong in this case.

Meanwhile, if the main trend in most of High Asia does seem to be glacier retreat, various lines of evidence show that it is occurring at very different rates in different mountain ranges, even within the same mountains. A 2006 survey of 5,020 glaciers in the mountains of western China and the Tibetan Plateau found widely differing rates of reduction. It also found 894 glaciers, about 18%, have advanced in recent decades. The jury is still out on a 2009 report from India [pdf], which questions the scale and reality of the extreme rates of retreat formerly reported for the Himalayas, and projections based on them.

None of this is to suggest that climate change is not a serious issue in the Karakoram. In every valley of the region farmers tell me the winters have grown shorter in the past couple of decades, there is less snow and more rain. They report an increase in windstorms and rain during summer. Formerly, clear, sunny weather in autumn was reliable and perfect for drying grain, fruit and winter fodder, and for post-harvest chores around the villages. Not any more. They report increasing problems with damp and mildew from insufficient drying days. Rain and wind threaten the harvest and damage buildings. These are, in fact, more immediate hazards for the mountain communities than anything that may be happening to the glaciers. This refers to the inhabited areas at lower elevations, where more, and more severe, rainstorms have been reported in recent years, notably a disastrous storm on September 9, 1992. It triggered rockfalls and debris flows that damaged many villages, closed most roads and stranded tourists. Again, advancing glaciers are also a response to climate change – and are not necessarily good news.

Although there have been reports and discussions of Karakoram glaciers since the mid-nineteenth century, they have been patchy in space and time and of varying quality. The glaciers are not, and have never been, consistently monitored. Few glaciers anywhere in the inner Asian mountains meet the criteria of the World Glacier Monitoring Service, and hence have not been tracked by it. The cries of concern for these glaciers should at least highlight the need for more reliable data and a better grasp of climate-glacier interactions in the world’s highest mountains.

Panmah Glacier accumulation zone, showing surrounding rock walls up to 2,500 metres high around the Latok Peaks, June 2005. (Photograph/Kenneth Hewitt, 2005)

The glacier cover of High Asia exceeds 110,000 square kilometres, the number of identifiable glaciers more than 50,000. There are major concentrations in about a dozen mountain ranges, forming watersheds of all the major rivers of the central, south and south-east Asian mainland. The Upper Indus and Yarkand basins have around 21,000 square kilometres of glaciers, the larger fraction in the Greater Karakoram, or about 16,500 square kilometres. Most of the biggest valley glaciers outside polar regions are found here. While there are more than 5,000 individual glaciers, just 12 make up almost half the ice cover. Melt waters from glacier basins comprise more than 40% of the average annual flows of the Indus and the Yarkand, with a potential to affect the lives of some millions of people downstream. While there was a roughly 10% reduction of the Karakoram ice cover in the first 60 years of the twentieth century, no significant reduction has occurred in recent decades and, as noted, many glaciers are undergoing advances.

One must qualify the notion that threats only arise from “disappearing” glaciers or in proportion to the rate of reduction. This is certainly a cause for concern, in itself or in what it implies about humanly induced atmospheric changes. But growing glaciers are not necessarily benign. In most glacierised mountains, certainly the Karakoram Himalaya, the worst consequences experienced in recent history came with the enlarged ice cover of the Little Ice Age: a period of several centuries, ending just over 100 years ago, when glaciers grew throughout the northern hemisphere. From those events come most of the stories and fears about glaciers recalled in Himalayan towns and villages. The considerable reduction of the glaciers observed between about 1910 and the 1960s was, in effect, removing ice stored in the Little Ice Age, a process that is not yet complete. Today’s glaciers are larger than a few centuries ago. Meanwhile, the evidence of advances in the Karakoram not only indicates a different response here to changing climate. It raises the prospect of a return to the hazards of advancing ice not seen since the Little Ice Age.

NEXT: Factors underlying regional variance

Kenneth Hewitt is professor emeritus in geography and environmental studies and research associate at the Cold Regions Research Centre at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada.

Homepage image by Kenneth Hewitt shows the upper Chiring-Panmah Glacier in 2005 and illustrates the prevalence of steep rock walls in the upper parts of these glacier basins.

[Download Kenneth Hewitt's full report here]

Understanding glacier changes (2)

Kenneth Hewitt — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:04:00 +0000

How are glaciers affected by climate change? In the second segment of a three-part article, Kenneth Hewitt explains regional variance.

[Download Kenneth Hewitt's full report here]

As we saw in part one, climate change is obviously having different consequences in different mountain areas of Asia. The situation in the Karakoram must represent some distinctive conditions. Three features of the regional environment seem critical. The first two relate to snowfall and the nourishment of these glaciers. They are intermediate in type between the summer accumulation (snowfall) glaciers of the greater Himalayas, and the winter accumulation glaciers of, say, the Caucasus and European Alps to the west. In each of the latter, more or less strong glacier retreat is reported. Second, the zone of maximum precipitation in the Karakoram is much higher than in these and most other mountain ranges. It is also entirely within the accumulation zones of the glaciers. This relates to the third factor, the exceptional elevations and, especially, elevation range of these ice masses.

The glaciers of large and intermediate size originate at very high altitudes and many of them descend much lower than elsewhere in the sub-tropics. Five glaciers span more than 5,000 metres in elevation, 15 over 4,500 metres and more than 30 over 3,000 metres. In the Hunza valleys of the central Karakoram, glacier termini advance below 2,300 metres above sea level. Those on the north flank in the Yarkand drainage do not descend so low because the valleys are at greater elevations, but they include several descending more than 4, 000 metres, due to location in the very highest parts of the range around K2 (8,610 metres). All of the glaciers recently observed to be growing are in these high-relief basins. Of special interest, but poorly understood, is how elevation and topography interact with the regional climatic influences to determine the behaviour of the glaciers.

The regional climate of this south-western part of the Inner Asian mountains comes under the influence of three different, seasonally varying, weather systems. First, the winter half of the year is dominated by a westerly or “sub-Mediterranean” circulation. Second, in summer, moisture comes from the Indian Ocean to the south and the climate becomes “sub-monsoonal”. Third, inner Asian high-pressure systems, especially involving the Tibetan Plateau, interact with the other two systems to affect storm paths and the incidence of clear weather. The last is critical, since direct solar radiation is responsible for 80% to 90% of melting on the glaciers.

Global climate change is expected to alter the absolute and relative roles of all three systems, a likely factor in recent developments that complicates forecasting of future glacier changes. Meanwhile, investigations on the glaciers at higher elevations have revealed how different conditions are from the valley weather stations – mostly below 3,000 metres above sea level – whose records had dominated climatic interpretations.

Station records from the inhabited areas of the Karakoram show two-thirds or more of precipitation occurs in winter, mainly February through May. The average annual precipitation in these valleys is 150 millimetres to 300 millimetres water equivalent – an arid or semi-arid environment with severe summer drought. However, a very different story emerged from our measurements on the glaciers in the 1980s. At elevations above 4,800 metres we found that snowfall amounts are roughly the same in summer and winter, with roughly equal amounts coming from the west and the Indian Ocean. Summer drought was not observed on the glaciers especially in their accumulation zones above 4,500 metres above sea level.

Moreover, the zone of maximum precipitation turned out to be between 5,000 metres and 6,000 metres above sea level – much higher than in, say, the eastern Himalaya or any other reports from tropical mountains. Moreover, accumulation zone snowfall is equivalent to between 1,000 millimetres and 2,000 millimetres of water; far more moisture than the valley stations suggest. What is identified here is a powerful gradient in climatic conditions with elevation – a five- to 10-fold increase in precipitation from glacier termini around 2,500 metres above sea level, to where the snow falls that nourishes the glaciers. A recent, pioneering study based on satellite imagery – conducted by Bibi S Naz and colleagues at Purdue University in Indiana – suggests snowfall amounts and the extent of perennial snow cover have increased in the past couple of decades at high elevations in the Central Karakoram.

Summer storm on the Baltoro Glacier at 4,600 metres above sea level, at the limit of rain(below) and snowfall (above). The exceptional height to which there was rain seems to reflect climate warming. However, at the height of the ablation season the storm virtually shut down melting here and greatly reduced it lower down. (Photograph/Kenneth Hewitt August 2005)

Vertical gradients also define key conditions for the melting of the glaciers, and their contribution to water supply. In fact, although many ice tongues descend much lower, the decisive conditions for melting occur between 3,800 metres and 4,800 metres above sea level. Here lie more than 80% of the ice surfaces where melting occurs in summer. Ablation conditions – under which ice melts – also identify complexities that arise with timing and seasonal rhythms as well as elevation. Nearly all the melting and water production of the glaciers occurs in just a few weeks of summer, when temperatures rise above zero and strong sunlight occurs. In turn, this explains why 70% to 80% of the flow of the upper Indus and Yarkand rivers occurs in six to 10 weeks of summer – usually in July and August – lagged until winter snow sitting on the ablation zone has melted away to expose the ice.

Moreover, melting is very sensitive to summer cloud cover or storms. A sudden summer storm can shut down melting for days at a time. Just when and for how long rapid and extensive melting occurs varies greatly from week to week, and year to year. It is one of the most sensitive variables affected by climate change.

Middle ablation zone of Biafo glacier after the first winter snowfall in October, 2009. The main glacier is over 500 metres thick here and 3.5 kilometres wide. (Photograph/Kenneth Hewitt 2009)

Another huge and poorly understood fact is that most Karakoram glaciers are largely or wholly avalanche-fed. The accumulation zone areas of these glaciers, above about 4,600 metres above sea level, are generally 70% to 80% steep rock walls. The larger part of high altitude snowfall in the region is on to these unstable slopes, and is avalanched more than 1,000 metres before incorporation into a glacier. It seems likely that changes in snowfall amounts, with season or in storm intensities, will alter the timing, temperature relations, and extent of avalanching. This can, in turn, affect glacier behaviour. The trouble is, there are no data or research to help predict what climate change does to this all-important part of the nourishment of the glaciers.

All-season avalanches that descend to the surface of Barpu Glacier are the main way ice is nourished. This one falls more than 2000 metres, is two kilometres wide and will travel several kilometres down the glacier. (Photograph/Kenneth Hewitt. August 2006)

What can be said is that what happens between 3,800 metres and 7,000 metres above sea level is absolutely critical to the role of climate and climate change in glacier behaviour and survival. These are also the elevations where the reasons for the seemingly anomalous recent responses of Karakoram glaciers must be sought. However, it is here that the least research has been done. There are no permanent measuring stations or long-term monitoring. To recognise how unfortunate that is, we need to address changes that are, or may become, unusually threatening to human communities and activities.

NEXT: Risks and responses

Kenneth Hewitt is professor emeritus in geography and environmental studies and research associate at the Cold Regions Research Centre at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada.

Homepage image by Kenneth Hewitt shows icefall on Charakusa Glacier, east-central Karakoram in June, 2005.

[Download Kenneth Hewitt's full report here]

Understanding glacier changes (3)

Kenneth Hewitt — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:07:00 +0000

Whether expanding or retreating, changes in the planet’s glaciers pose dangers for humans. In the conclusion of a three-part article, Kenneth Hewitt explores these risks.

[Download Kenneth Hewitt's full report here]

Glaciers and their immediate environs present many dangers for humans, such as crevasses and glacier mills into which one might fall, heavily crevassed ice falls, snow and ice avalanches from the side walls and, along the flanks, dumping of great boulders, ponding and floods from melt water. For these reasons, there are hardly ever permanent settlements on or right beside the ice. These are hazards mainly to mountaineers, hunters, travellers and military expeditions. The more serious dangers arise from processes in the glacial environment that may extend their impacts beyond existing glacial areas. The more serious tend to involve ponding of water that leads to glacial outburst floods, or releases that generate debris flows.

Heavily debris-covered ice, Panmah Glacier Central Karakoram, around 4,000 metres above sea level. Note that even the heaviest debris on active ice is rarely more than 2 metres thick. The relief of mounds and cones is almost entirely ice cored and the debris is constantly shifting around. (Photograph/Kenneth Hewitt, June 2009)

The risk of glacier lake outburst floods has received particular attention in other parts of the Himalaya, notably Bhutan, Nepal and Tibet. In Nepal, some 25 glacial lake outburst floods have been recorded since the 1930s, with especially destructive events in 1985 and 1991. Bhutan also has a number of dangerous lakes, one of which burst with disastrous consequences in 1994. Reports suggest all of these lakes and the triggers for outburst floods are related to climate warming and glacier retreat. There is also a history of such outburst floods from Karakoram glaciers. However, the problem here is also very different from that recently reported elsewhere in the Himalayas. In particular, the most serious threats involve, specifically, much larger impoundments by short-lived, unstable ice dams. Crucially, all recorded examples have been associated with advancing glaciers.

In fact, the Karakoram presents two rather different groups of outburst floods. The most frequent are relatively local events. Collectively, they threaten dozens if not hundreds of small settlements in the higher valleys and examples occur in most years. They involve a wide variety of dam compositions, forms and outburst types, including ice, moraine, and mixed-barriers. Conversion of outburst floods into debris flows is quite common, usually the more severe risk. For the upper Indus, these are the only types of damaging outburst floods reported in the past several decades. Moreover, they occur whether glaciers are advancing, retreating and relatively stable. Conversely, the larger Karakoram dams involve impoundment of a main river valley by a relatively large tributary glacier. Most important, in the present context, these dams only form from a vigorous forward push of the ice.

A series of ice margin lakes along Nobonde Sobande arm of Panmah Glacier, central Karakoram seen from Drenmang (4,500 metres above sea level). Some are behind old lateral moraines, others ponded against the edges of active ice. The glacier is about two kilometres wide here and 10 kilometres of the main ice stream are visible. (Photograph/Kenneth Hewitt 1994)

More than 60 glaciers of intermediate-to-large size (10 kilometres to 65 kilometres in length) have a history of advancing into and interfering with tributaries of the upper Indus and Yarkand rivers. Not all are known to have created actual dams, but at least 30 have done so and involved outburst floods of exceptional size and destructiveness. However, while there have been several large dams recently on the Shaksgam, on the Indus the last major ice dam was in 1933. “Major” refers to outburst floods that were large enough to register hundreds of kilometres downstream at the river gauge at Attock, where the river leaves the mountains.

The most urgent questions today involve some Karakoram valleys whose glaciers created ice dams and catastrophic outburst floods in the past and that are advancing right now. Will they impound the rivers again? Three locations require special attention; the Shaksgam, upper Shyok and Shimshal valleys.

The Shaksgam is a tributary of the upper Yarkand. According to satellite imagery, five glaciers that have formed ice dams in the past are advancing at present. One of them, the Kyagar, has created several recent dams. An outburst from the one in 1999 caused severe damages along the lower Yarkand River in Kashgar district. In the summer of 2009, Kyagar again impounded the river and a 3.5 kilometre-long lake was formed. Fortunately it drained slowly but was close to dimensions that have led to disastrous floods in the past. There were great difficulties in obtaining satellite coverage and scientists were unable to visit the site and monitor the lake so as to predict its behaviour. This raises serious issues about what would have happened if a large outburst had occurred, and what will happen in future cases. It seems a new impoundment will form at Kyagar in 2010, and the four other glaciers are across or entering the river and may impound it.

The terminus of Yazghil Glacier, north-west Karakoram, where it enters the Shimshal River. This is one of several Karakoram glaciers on the upper Indus and upper Yarkand Rivers that have caused ice dams and glacier outburst floods in the past, and are presently advancing across the rivers. (Photograph/Kenneth Hewitt July, 1998)

On the Indus, three glaciers in Shimshal and three on the upper Shyok, that have formed ice dams in the past, began advancing about a decade ago. They have not yet reached positions where a dam could form, but could do so quite soon. Historically, the most dangerous have been the Chong Khumdan and Kitchik Khumdan on the Shyok. In 2009, satellite imagery revealed a sudden and large increase in thickness of the Chong Khumdan, and advance of its terminus into the river. Between 1926 and 1932, this glacier formed a series of large ice dams. At least four outburst floods were reported that caused appreciable rises in the river 1,100 kilometres away at Attock.

The 1929 event was the largest on record, and did great damage throughout the mountains and to the Indus Plains. The lake reached over 15 kilometres in length but drained in less than 24 hours. The Kitchik Khumdan also formed large ice dams in the nineteenth century, and its terminus is back in the river and has advanced across the river which passes beneath the ice. However, 2009 satellite imagery suggests it is beginning to waste back again. Conversely, its immediate neighbour the Aqtash Glacier which has also formed dams in the past advanced across the river in 2008 and 2009 and seems to be advancing very rapidly.

These glaciers highlight problems of security and the legacies of conflicts that exist in many parts of High Asia. They are in a militarised zone disputed by China, India and Pakistan. Apparently the Khumdan glaciers fall under the control of Chinese forces, but the dangers from the outburst floods are primarily in Indian and, especially, Pakistan-controlled areas. Given existing tensions, including the India-Pakistan “war” on the Siachen Glacier nearby, it is unclear how necessary studies, monitoring and warning systems can be set up.

Other hazardous phenomena

The focus here has been on glaciers, but it needs emphasising there is a range of cold climate or cryosphere phenomena that may become hazardous through climate change. Communities, infrastructure and related activities confront changes in snowfall, snow-on-the-ground and permafrost, specifically ground ice. They will also be affected by changes in distribution and intensities of freeze-thaw, the quantities and timing of surface and ground waters and their quality (water temperatures, turbidity and dissolved matter, for instance).

The accumulation zone of Biafo Glacier near Hispar Pass (5,150 metres), showing the development of cornices along ridge lines due to wind action, avalanched steep walls and heavy build up of snow on gentler slopes. (Photograph/Kenneth Hewitt, June 1999)

The entire mountain area is covered by seasonal snowfall, varying in duration and depth with elevation. Its melting provides about half of stream flows in an average year. Permafrost – perennially frozen ground – at intermediate altitudes is much more extensive than glaciers and includes hundreds of ice-cored rock glaciers. Freeze-thaw cycles affect even larger areas, as do erosion and deposition forms created by snow avalanches. All of these are affected by climate change. Their responses interact physically, and in ways that modify the scope or significance of glacier-related risks.

High elevation conditions on Karakoram glaciers: rockwalls, ice falls, avalanches of Broad Peak (8,050 metres), part of the watershed of Baltoro Glacier. (Photograph/Kenneth Hewitt, 2005)

Retreating glaciers and warming permafrost are associated with destabilised slopes. They can lead directly to landslides, or reduce the strength thresholds for, and the likelihood or size of, slope failures due to earthquakes or storms, which trigger most of the more destructive landslide events. For example, a dangerous landslide occurred on January 4, which blocked the Hunza River in the central Karakoram and probably involved destabilisation by changing moisture and temperature conditions in the slopes. The lake has already grown to 5.5 kilometres in length, forcing the evacuation of thousands of residents. Moreover, the lake behind a similar landslide dam in 1858, immediately upstream of the present one, lasted seven months then burst with catastrophic effects all the way to the Indus plains. Meanwhile, slopes exposed by reduced ice or snow cover may dry out and become useless. Conversely, some may also become vegetated and economically useful for timber, firewood, for pastoralists and even for cultivation.

The more immediate glacier hazards and response needs in the region involve communities and activities in the high mountains. Only the Andean highlands rival inner Asia in the numbers and diversity of settlements close to and at direct risk from glacier change. However, for the broader national and international contexts, the major issues raised concern water resources and their reliability.

Some caution is needed here. A commonplace of recent reports is to say that the lives and livelihoods of in excess of 1.5 billion people are critically dependent upon the glaciers in the headwaters of the largest Asian rivers. This is a misleading generalisation. Yes, such are the numbers of people living in river basins with tributaries coming from glacierised mountains. However, in most cases the glaciers are a tiny part of the river flows, notably in the most heavily populated areas of China, India and the south-east Asian mainland.

Snowfall affects much vaster areas than the glacier cover, and is more critical. For the vast majority of these populations, rainfall and ground waters are far more important than snowfall. Glacier change can have impacts on these other parts of the hydrological cycle or may compound changes in them, but the processes are mostly indirect and too poorly known to make such generalisations. Whether and how far there are significant risks for most of these populations, even from the “disappearing” glaciers’ scenario, is far from certain.

The Indus and Yarkand basins do involve large populations directly, or potentially, dependent on the glaciers. Even here, however, there have been exaggerated or misleading claims. Yes, glacier melt waters comprise more than one-third of the flow of the main stem of the Indus, snow and ice together providing over two-thirds. It has the largest ratio of melt water to population of any river, anywhere in the world. At the moment, however, nearly all the glacial melt water goes to the sea. It happens to coincide with the heavy monsoonal rains, making flooding the greater problem, and Pakistan lacks the capacity to store much or any of the melt waters at that time.

More exactly, the key roles of glacier melt waters have little to do with the total size of the ice cover, total melt water yields, or trends. Rather they turn upon demand in just a few weeks of the year and, in rare, extreme cases when the winter rains or monsoon are very weak, poorly timed, or fail. Even for Pakistan, the main dangers for the country as a whole are, therefore, potential rather than actual, and not so much in relation to glacier change as to planned and possible water resource developments. These seem to be being undertaken with inadequate understanding and assessment of how climate and glacier fluctuations will affect them.

This will become increasingly acute for all countries of the region and raise important transboundary concerns. There are the huge commitments being made now, to hydroelectric power, irrigation, urbanisation and other developments for which water from snow and ice will become increasingly crucial. More than 100 existing dams depend partly on glacial melt waters. Several hundred more, and some of great size, are under construction or planned for China, India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bhutan.

Given the present state of monitoring and scientific understanding, it is hard to believe any of these have adequate or accurate assessments of climate- and glacier-change impacts. For the Karakoram it is of singular concern to determine whether, as global warming continues, there will be a return to glacier retreat as some believe, or if the factors responsible for the present advances will intensify. Either way, there are serious implications for how communities in Pakistan, China and India, especially, are affected and need to respond.

The importance of climate change is not in doubt, but research and policies should be based on actual evidence. Where unavailable, that should be acknowledged, not – as has happened with glacier change in the Karakoram – simply replaced by supposition based on developments or models from elsewhere. Much of what is being said fails to recognise the patchiness of past research in space and time, and a nearly-total absence of glacier monitoring at elevations where the most critical ice and climate changes occur.

The limited evidence surely reflects, in part, the sheer scale, diversity and logistical difficulties of scientific work in much of the region. Now, as more resources become available to investigate these problems, it is important to identify what sorts of information are needed, where and how they can be best obtained. Science and information systems and regional cooperation need to address the complexity and diversity of the greater Himalayan region. Some practical suggestions being promoted by new programmes include the following:

* To set up improved monitoring systems that combine remotely sensed and automatic station measurements with ground control related to basic glaciological and hydrological research;

* To expand comprehensive, multi-disciplinary research that addresses environmental and cultural complexities in the region;

* To pursue regional cooperation in data sharing, risk and resource assessments; and

* To actively involve local communities in the mountains, so that their ecological knowledge and practical concerns inform understanding and help to shape appropriate development.

Kenneth Hewitt is professor emeritus in geography and environmental studies and research associate at the Cold Regions Research Centre at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada.

Homepage image by Kenneth Hewitt shows icefalls descending to the main glacier at Kaberi-Kondus Glacier, east-central Karakoram in 1998

[Download Kenneth Hewitt's full report here]

Facing America’s demons (1)

Judith Shapiro — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:51:00 +0000

The treatment of indigenous peoples in the United States has left a stain on the past that China should not ignore, argues Judith Shapiro.

In its current phase of rapid development, China often looks to the experience of western countries for inspiration. The development and nature-conquest of the western United States is sometimes seen as a model for China’s “Develop the West” campaign. The environmental clean-up that occurred after the western industrial revolution is often mentioned to defend China’s environmental crisis, in the hope that the emerging Chinese middle class will press for an “environmental Kuznets curve”.

However, using the west as a model for economic development and environmental restoration can be a grave mistake. In the United States, such development came at great cost for indigenous peoples and for the environment, damage that cannot be undone. The great wealth of the United States rests on an “original sin” of the theft of lands and resources of the millions of Native Americans who lived in America when white settlers arrived.

Today, legal challenges to that theft are still being contested in the courts, while the social and economic problems of the Indians who have been so profoundly victimised over the last two centuries remain an enduring stain on US honour and integrity and are a heavy and painful historical legacy. These injustices haunt our nation and cannot easily be rectified. Emerging economies aspiring to join a global community of civilised nations should learn from America’s errors.

A core theme of US experience in developing the west is the forcible relocation of Native Americans through atrocities such as the 1831 “Trail of Tears”, during which the Choctaw, Cherokee, Seminole and other nations were moved from the south-eastern part of the United States to what is today’s Oklahoma, thousands of Indians dying from disease and starvation along the way.

During the nineteenth century and early-twentieth century, the systematic effort to weaken and destroy Native Americans was official national policy. In the mid-nineteenth century, battles wiped out entire populations, including women and children, while “bounty hunters” were rewarded for each Indian scalp they produced. Other strategies involved eradication of traditional food animals such as the buffalo, theft and slaughter of horses (the Indians’ transportation for hunting and defence), and the deliberate introduction of smallpox.

Later, after the defeated Indians were squeezed into reservations, Native American children were forced into boarding schools where they were forbidden to practice their own cultural traditions or speak their native languages. The natives were gradually relocated into smaller and smaller plots of inferior land until the territory that they retained was only a tiny fraction of their former empires. The story is long, painful and twisted. Many promises were made and broken, many treaties signed and abrogated. As the Sioux leader Red Cloud said, famously, “They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one: they promised to take our land and they took it.”

This is a classic story of colonisation and imperial expansion. Political scientists say that states expand their territories in order to capture access to resources, to gain territory for excess populations, and to secure markets for trade. The story of the Lakota Sioux is just that, a struggle over land and resources that changed as new resources such as gold and uranium were discovered on lands formerly conceded to the Indians.

A huge population wave of white settlers travelling from the east in search of new lives ultimately doomed the Indians, leaving Red Cloud to comment in 1870, “The white children have surrounded me and left nothing but an island. When we first had this land we were strong, but now are melting like snow on a hillside, while you are grown like spring grass.” He further begged, futilely, “I have two mountains, Paha Sapa (Black Hills) and the Big Horn Mountains. I want the father (president) to make no roads through them.”

This is also a story of cultural genocide as white people, who claimed that they knew what was best for the “uncivilised” and “savage” nomadic peoples, forced the Indians into reservations, where they were made to give up their hunting culture. Above all it is a story which has resulted in six generations of complete dependency on the US government, decimation of tradition and identity and deep problems of unemployment, alcoholism, gangs, depression, factionalised tribal leadership and unfulfilled longing for justice and a return to former glory.

While I may seem critical or even biased, the US Supreme Court validated these criticisms in its 1980 decision on restitution for the illegal taking of the Black Hills, and the broad outlines of this history are commonly accepted. Unfortunately, many young Americans are not taught this history in their schools and many Indians today feel as if they are forgotten or invisible.

The Lakota Sioux were moved to reservations in South Dakota, in the mid-western United States, after lengthy struggles of resistance. I spent a week on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in May 2009 with a group of American University students seeking to understand efforts to improve the lives of the local people. The 13,000 square-kilometre reservation was created in 1889, and is the second largest Indian reservation in the United States. Pine Ridge is larger than the state of Connecticut, in the east of the country, and has a population estimated at more than 30,000, though the official figure is only 19,000 because many are homeless or avoid the census-taker.

The reservation is today one of the poorest places in the country, with an average annual income of only about US$3,000 (20,500 yuan) per capita, and its people are faced with social and economic problems as profound as any to be found in the developing world.

The teen suicide rate is among the highest in the nation, twice the national average; infant mortality is 300 times the national average; diabetes and tuberculosis rates are eight times the national average; alcoholism is rampant despite the ban on liquor within reservation boundaries, and unemployment is at 85%. Life expectancy for a male living on the reservation is only 46 years and for a female it is 49. Many homes have no running water or electricity, and racist violence is routine in neighboring towns and in Rapid City, the nearest large town. Although the tribal government is supposed to be “autonomous”, major decisions are controlled by the federal government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA).

Dislocations from native lands and transformations of familiar landscapes were important ingredients in creating the deep social problems that the reserve faces today.

Judith Shapiro is director of the Natural Resources and Sustainable Development MA Program at the School of International Service, American University, Washington DC.

NEXT: The consequences of displacement.

Homepage image by Sage shows a reservation flag.

Facing America’s demons (2)

Judith Shapiro — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 14:50:00 +0000

White settlers in America uprooted indigenous people from their lands, causing untold environmental and cultural destruction. In the second segment of a three-part article, Judith Shapiro tells the story of one tribe.

The Lakota, a division of other Sioux nations including Dakota and Nakota, were once a nomadic people who roamed prairies and plains, hunting buffalo over a vast area stretching from Wisconsin to the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming, north into Canada, and south to Kansas.

Tribal legends traced their origins to the Black Hills of today’s South Dakota, and these mountains, where white people eventually carved the images of four US presidents into Mount Rushmore, are among the seized territories that are most profoundly regretted and contested in the US court system today.

The Lakota, the largest group of Sioux, were further subdivided into bands including the Oglala, Hunkpapa, and five others. When the reservations were established, all Indians had to “enroll” in a tribe, and today the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is the home to the Oglala Sioux.

The traditional diet consisted of buffalo, a lean, high-protein food, supplemented by wild turnips, chokecherries, and a few domesticated vegetables, such as corn and squash, acquired through trade with other tribes. Early contact with white people rested primarily on the fur trade; Fort Laramie was built in 1834 to facilitate the trade in buffalo hides after the beaver had been trapped-out. French-descended fur traders intermarried with the Indians and produced “half-breed” children, who served as interpreters and facilitated further fruitful contacts between whites and the Sioux.

By the mid-nineteenth century, however, buffalo began to disappear as whites armed with guns slaughtered them en masse in order to harvest their tongues, which were considered a delicacy. This deeply offended the Indians, who used every bit of the animal for food, shelter, clothing, and religious ritual. The Oregon Trail toward the Pacific Northwest passed through Fort Laramie and the influx of whites threatened Lakota sovereignty and livelihood.

A series of battles ended with the famous treaty of 1868, in which the United States recognised the entire western half of South Dakota (which included the Black Hills) as the Great Sioux Reservation as well as eastern Wyoming as “unceded Indian territory.” No Americans were to be allowed into these areas except to trade and conduct government business. Importantly, no changes were to be permitted to the treaty unless three-quarters of all adult Indian males signed and, today, court challenges to subsequent US seizures of Indian lands rest on this provision, since the signatures on documents that subsequently modified the treaty were incomplete.

As more gold was confirmed through General George Armstrong Custer’s famous 1874 expedition, the United States tried to purchase the Black Hills, and an enormous gold rush began. The Indians refused to sell, for they had no concept of land ownership; the leader Black Hawk commented, for example, “My reason teaches me that land cannot be sold. The Great Spirit gave it to his children to live upon. So long as they occupy and cultivate it, they have a right to the soil. Nothing can be sold but such things as can be carried away.”

The Indians were pressured to relocate. Many of them did so, as the buffalo were nearly gone and there was little hunting. The US Army then ordered all Indians to go to their “agencies” or reservation centres, and those who refused were labelled as “hostile”. A series of “Powder River” skirmishes culminated in the 1876 Battle of Little Big Horn against General Custer, which made leaders such as Crazy Horse famous. This was the last major victory for the Indians and the beginning of a precipitous decline in their fortunes.

In 1877, the Indians were forced, through starvation induced by the withholding of rations, to give up the Black Hills. Even then, most refused to sign the new treaty, and only one-tenth of the signatures were obtained, not the required three-quarters. By 1878, Pine Ridge and other reservations were well established, and later agreements forced upon the Indians permitted immigrant farmers and miners to colonise other parts of Indian lands.

The remaining patchwork of Indian reservations is but a shadow of the territory originally promised in the peace treaty of 1868. The buffalo have been decimated, the tall-grass prairies that once stood as high as a man’s shoulders has gone to desert through overgrazing and farming, the last of the passenger pigeons, which once darkened the skies for days through their great migrations, died in 1914 in a zoo. In the name of modernisation and the founding of a “New World” based on what were believed to be limitless resources, the ecosystems of the great American plains were utterly and irretrievably transformed.

By the late-nineteenth century, then, the Sioux Indians had lost all trace of their traditional hunting lifestyle. Their livelihood was gone, they were forbidden to pursue nomadic ways, and they were forced into complete dependency on the government for food, as legal wards of the state.

In the last years of the century, in what was perhaps a symptom of the profundity of the cultural depression, a prophetic mystical movement spread all over Indian lands, sparked by a visionary named Wovoka, a Paiute Indian. His vision was that Indians should dance a “Ghost Dance” that would revive their dead ancestors, bring back the buffalo, and remove the whites from America. The Oglala Lakota Sioux adopted this vision with fervour and added the idea that wearing a special “Ghost Shirt” would protect the wearer from white people’s bullets.

By 1890, hundreds of Indians were dancing. The whites panicked and tried to ban the dance, and the famous spiritual leader Sitting Bull, a supporter of the dance was killed. Tensions mounted, leaving some Indians to move into the badlands, where they were stopped by members of the 7th US Cavalry. Eventually, Chief Big Foot surrendered, and the group was escorted back toward Pine Ridge Reservation. As they camped at Wounded Knee Creek, shots were fired. Believing that the ghost shirts would protect them, the Indians failed to protect themselves and a great massacre of hundreds of Indian men, women and children took place. The December 29, 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee is considered the end of Indian efforts to resist the white man, and the beginning of more than a century of grief and loss of cultural identity.

Americanisation and forcible assimilation followed. Well-meaning missionaries from different Christian sects were assigned Indian reservations so they would not need to compete with each other; the Episcopal Church received rights to Pine Ridge when president Ulysses S Grant installed religious clergymen as government agents (thus departing from the principle of separation of church and state). Believing that they were doing the right thing for the poor heathens, they taught that their religion was best and the Indians were ignorant devil worshippers. They took Indian children out of the reservation to faraway boarding schools, where their long braids were cut and they were taught that their parents were savages. Children were forbidden to speak Lakota language in school. Eventually, many Indians internalised the message that their culture was inferior and developed a profound self-loathing that psychologists recognize as a form of massive cultural trauma.

Traditional government was replaced by that of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), which hired cooperative Oglala to enforce white people’s laws. Although land was supposed to be assigned to Indians, the Indians, as noted above, did not have a concept of land ownership and much of the land was tricked away from them. Subsequent generational claims made land-tenure rights impossibly complicated.

There were further twists in the history when, in 1934, the Indian Reorganization Act allowed tribes to write constitutions and the BIA stopped suppressing local culture. This policy changed once again in the 1950s, when the US government temporarily pursued a policy of “termination” or ending tribal life and encouraging relocation out of the reservation to other cities in the United States. Few Indians were equipped with the skills necessary to make it and most eventually returned to “the rez”.

Today, Indian males have little function as they are completely dependent on the government. Families have no tradition of going to work and holding jobs. The lands that they have been given are relatively unfertile and lacking in natural resources; the Black Hills lands, rich in minerals, were seized and in any case traditional Sioux beliefs would have forbidden digging into the earth. Tribal governments do not hold real power, but they are nonetheless factionalised and corrupt. In the 1960s, a militant group called the American Indian Movement embarked on a struggle against corrupt conservatives who were running the reservation. They marched to Washington and took over the BIA for several days; when they returned to the reservation, violent skirmishes among factions ended in a 1973 four-month standoff against Federal marshals on the site of the old Wounded Knee Massacre. Bitterness over these events lingers even today.

In 1975, the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act allowed for greater self-government, including the right of Indians to run their own police force and to control the schools. Meanwhile, lawsuits pursuing land claims under the treaty of 1868 made their way all the way to the US Supreme Court, which ruled in 1980 that the Indians were entitled to compensation for the theft of their land, plus interest. They handed down a monetary judgment for the US$17 million (116 million yuan) initial offering price, plus interest, which today amounts to more than US$400 million.(2.7 billion yuan).

However, the Sioux have refused to accept the money, arguing that their land is not for sale and that they were not properly represented by their attorneys. To this day, many Lakota argue for the return of the Black Hills under the terms of the treaty of 1868 and continue to pursue legal and diplomatic avenues to get back their lands.

Judith Shapiro is director of the Natural Resources and Sustainable Development MA Program at the School of International Service, American University, Washington DC.

NEXT: A lesson for China?

Homepage image from Wikipedia shows the Battle of Little Big Horn.

Facing America’s demons (3)

Judith Shapiro — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 11:26:00 +0000

In the conclusion of a three-part article on American Indians, Judith Shapiro urges China to heed the grievous mistakes of the United States in the development of its lands.

The history of the forced removal of the Lakota Sioux from their lands, while it seems to have happened long ago, is vibrantly alive for the Indians living on the reservation today. Many of them can tell stories of how their parents were sent to faraway boarding schools and taught that their culture was inferior. The ban on Lakota culture and language was lifted only in 1971, well within the memory of many living adults.

The profound cultural trauma that these people have experienced has left many of them deeply hopeless and without a clear sense of their own future or destiny as a nation. Everywhere I went during a week I spent on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, I heard again the stories of the treaty of 1868, of the massacre at Wounded Knee, and of the theft of the sacred Black Hills which are held to be the origin of the Lakota people. I experienced the profound mistrust of outsiders, particularly white people. And I witnessed among some residents a sense of defeat far more profound than any I have observed in all my travels in less developed countries throughout the world.

On the reservation today, the only truly successful business is a gambling casino called Prairie Winds (Native Americans are exempt from state prohibitions on organised gambling). Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, many of those who lose money are themselves Native Americans. There is talk of developing wind power; so far these conversations have not led to substantial results. While there is also talk of oil and mineral resources, the Indians will not permit the sacred lands to be scarred with mines, and in a case of “environmental injustice”, new uranium mines off the reservation threaten to taint downstream Indian rivers with radioactive materials.

There are signs of hope, but these are few: two Native American brothers have been appointed to lead the Badlands National Park and Mount Rushmore. An image of the great Indian warrior Crazy Horse is being carved a few miles away from the images of the US presidents. A sacred Black Hills mountain, Bear Butte, is being closed to non-Indians during times when rituals are most important, although its peace is also gravely threatened by the opening of a nearby rifle range, and the bars, campgrounds, and concert venues have greatly offended the local tribes.

A college, the Oglala Lakota College, has been opened on the reservation, where it offers advanced degrees in Lakota studies, nursing, business, information science, social work and other relevant fields. A “Lakotafund” has been created to extend micro-credit to small businesses such as beadwork and other traditional handicrafts. Some who have left the reservation to pursue advanced degrees and learn skills in other parts of the country have returned to try to make a contribution back home.

Meanwhile, in Washington, DC, the National Museum of the American Indian, established in 1989 by an act of Congress in an effort to acknowledge the great wrong of our history, is managed by Native Americans, whose greatest desire is to convey the message that “we’re still here”. Whether the US president, Barack Obama, will encourage Congress to revisit the great question of ownership of the Black Hills, and whether there are symbolic measures that could be taken to help move the Sioux nation toward healing, remains to be seen.

What, then, are we to take as lessons from this horrific story, and what might be relevant for Chinese policy makers today? First, it is worth reflecting on the relationship between resources, land, nation-building, and power – and reflecting seriously on the question of how to build a strong, prosperous nation while safeguarding justice for all citizens. Sometimes rigorous introspection and honesty may be required to discover whether one is using cultural superiority and stereotyping as a way to rationalise the seizure of other people’s land. In this case, resource extraction was a primary motivation for seizing Indians’ land, but it was often cloaked in rhetoric about doing what was best for the Indians.

Second, good intentions can sometimes be highly destructive. The American missionaries and civilisers truly believed that in forbidding the use of Lakota language and the practice of Lakota customs they were doing the right thing – even, perhaps, saving the Indians’ “souls” and allowing them to find a place in heaven by converting them to Christianity. However, the deprivation of identity and pride has turned out to be devastating for the native people, who are now trying to recover some of their traditions by reviving rituals such as the Sun Dance and to re-learn their language in native-run schools.

Third, modern technologies such as the gun, the road and the railroad, and foreign diseases such as smallpox, were highly destructive to the native peoples, and created an “uneven playing field” such that the native peoples had little chance of preserving their way of life. As environmental historians such as Jared Diamond and Alfred Crosby teach us, the outcome of this sort of clash of cultures can be determined as much by technology, disease and introduced species as by more conventional measures of military superiority.

Fourth, one of the high prices of civilisation and resource extraction is often environmental degradation and ecosystem transformation. Instead of the buffalo, passenger pigeon and tall grass prairie, the central United States saw desertification and dust storms, especially in the 1920s, a heavy and enduring price to pay for our overly enthusiastic grazing and farming practices.

Finally, indigenous peoples’ knowledge, while often not expressed in ways that modern “science” can hear and respect, nonetheless often can point the way toward more sustainable relationships with the land. Although some have warned against romanticising Native American wisdom and called “the ecological Indian” a myth, it is undeniable that the Sioux elders predicted that in the wasteful and over-consuming way of the white man lay ecological disaster.

I hope that this cautionary tale of the Pine Ridge Sioux provides fruit for reflection and discussion. Although there are obviously great historical differences between the United States and China, we have much to learn from each other, especially at this time when the gaps in our economic and social development are decreasing and we are coming more and more to resemble each other.

Judith Shapiro is director of the Natural Resources and Sustainable Development MA Program at the School of International Service, American University, Washington DC.

Homepage image by Serge Van Cauwenbergh