18 November 2010
Asian Water Supplies at Risk, Report Says
Washington — A concerted effort is needed to secure water and food supplies for people living in the greater Himalayas area, says a new report from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Climate change threatens to further squeeze resources in the heavily populated region. Because glaciers are retreating at a slow pace, however, development agencies and nations in the region have time to help communities prepare for the changes, according to Changing Glaciers and Hydrology in Asia: Addressing Vulnerability to Glacier Melt Impacts.
The report, presented this week in Washington, outlines steps that USAID can take in conjunction with local and national governments to help protect water supplies, reduce pollution that accelerates glacier melt and strengthen families and communities.
Scientists caution that long-term scientific data for many of the region’s glaciers still don’t exist, but say there is ample evidence that many glaciers at lower elevations are retreating. That means already-scarce water supplies needed to sustain crops and growing populations will decrease, authors of the report said.
“We wanted to get ahead of the curve instead of always reacting,” said Mary Melnyk, a senior natural resource management adviser for USAID’s Asia and Middle East bureaus. “We wanted to begin preparing and being proactive on environmental issues. The time to act is now.”
The region covered in the report includes nine major river basins and mountain ranges in India, Nepal, Bhutan, Afghanistan, China, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan and several other countries. It’s a large part of the world with diverse weather and climate conditions and a population of nearly 2 billion people.
DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMS SHOULD INTERSECT
Tackling water scarcity in the greater Himalayas area will require a new and cross-disciplinary approach by development agencies such as USAID, as well as a new level of cooperation among nations that depend on the glaciers for water, the report says.
“Climate change in general, and glacier melt specifically, can potentially impact all sectors — economic growth, government, health,” Melnyk said. “Addressing the impact of climate change and other environmental security issues still [is] not a part of our day-to-day business across these different sectors, so this report tries to push the envelope on that. All sectors need to be involved.”
Replacing primitive cookstoves that generate soot known to accelerate glacier melt should be one priority, the report says. The United States recently teamed up with the United Nations Foundation and a number of other countries to get 100 million homes worldwide to upgrade to better stoves by 2020.
Another priority for USAID in the greater Himalayas region, according to the report, should be to integrate family planning and other health services into community-based climate adaptation programs. Current population growth is not sustainable, said Kristina Yarrow, a health adviser in USAID’s Asia and Middle East bureaus who worked on the report.
“Population growth, which can be changed by the use of family planning, impacts glacier melt indirectly through the consumption and use of resources that exacerbate warming and black carbon.”
“Finding innovative ways to improve access to family planning — and to integrate family planning messages and services about healthy timing and spacing of pregnancy into adaptation programs — will prove to yield some very important co-benefits,” she said.
USAID’s already-robust family planning programs should be strengthened in areas vulnerable to glacier melts, such as the Ganges and Indus river basins, Yarrow said.
Nearly 500 million people live within the Ganges basin and more than 200 million within the Indus. Close to one-third of the water in the Indus River comes from glacier melt. Water scarcity in the heavily irrigated river basin is already a challenge for people living there, the report says.
(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)
