Climate Change in Himalaya

Source: http://climateobserver.org/unfccc-last-round-negotiations-limas-climate-summit-opens-bonn/ “ We can seal the deal with you on the condition that no funding goes to India!”  said my classmates representing the States to another group representing China, in the Global Environmental Change class of last week, a role-play simulation of  COP23 climate negotiation.  “ We cannot use the excuse of money – or the lack of it – not to do anything. Yes, developed countries have to make financial commitments, but what if they don’t?”  Charles Hopkins, from international humanitarian charity  CARE International  in Ethiopia called for government  especially those in Africa , to make the policies for disaster management in place.  This urgent appeal sent by Mr Hopkins as well as the simulated international game of ‘give-and-take’ are both consistent with what I am going to talk about here to end the Himalayas hazard blog series.  ...

In this post, let's continue to look at the existing and emerging methods to model the stage of a GLOF,  the reason why the advanced models are so far rarely seen in glacial hazard literature , and what are the main challenge for the modellers and research groups to achieve their expected goal of hazard assessment and prediction. Picture: Rumbak Valley in the catchment of Hemis National Park of  Himalayas, Rumbak is one of the numerous villages in the  Ladakh  Range   region of north-west India.  Credit:  Zhu Jing (writer), travelling in 2014 Review of available methods  Westoby et al., 2014  very well summarises and presents a number of approaches to model different stage or episode of a GLOF, which can be categorised as A Trigger Mechanism  A Dam Breach  An outburst downstream passage The simulation of a dam breach initiation and development largely rely on the empirical or analytical formulation ...

In past century, the natural hazard in the form of floods has become the most dominant disaster in the Himalayan region in terms of the frequency and scale of the damage that has been done. For examples, in  Bangladesh flood of 1998 , about 1000 people perished, 700,000 hectares of agricultural lands were wiped, more than a million people lost their home. According to  Asia Development Bank and World Bank 2010 : '' the direct damage caused by the floods was estimated to be US$6.5 billion, with an additional US$3.6 billion in indirect losses''.  Image: S. Bajracharya, ICIMOD, Nepal. Source:  State of Himalayan glaciers less alarming than feared  (http://www.media.uzh.ch/en/Press-Releases/archive/2012/teilentwarnung-fuer-himalaya-gletscher.html) Let’s first look at the nature of two relatively prevalent hazards in the Himalayas:  Monsoon Floods and Outburst Floods Monsoon Floods , as the name explains, are floods from the changes in monsoon r...

The topic of this week Global Environmental Change Seminar is GeoEngineering - known as ‘plan B’ - to counteract or mitigate the effects of climate change particularly driven by greenhouse gases. From Crutzen, P.J.paper 2006 to present, there has been a surge of attention to it along with debates.  Such an intentional intervention to ‘engineer’ the planet has two categories broadly referred as carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and solar radiation management (SRM) .  With good intention to address the climate challenges, the geoengineering proposals are largely theoretical and lack of scientific modelling and empirical research. The most difficult obstacle is the  governance,  legal and management  uncertainties .  The future climate projects leave us with a number of questions and an indeterminate picture of everything we would do to respond to what have done to the planet. The U.N. defines “dangerous anthropogenic interference” as  inadvertent climate...