Speaker 1: This is a C. N. A podcast
Speaker 1: up in the mountains. Climate change is remaking the rules,
Speaker 1: temperatures are soaring in the Himalayas and that's causing glaciers
Speaker 1: to retreat at an alarming speed threatened with floods and
Speaker 1: dry spells. Families living in the remote mountains are now
Speaker 1: forced to make hard choices. My name's Jack Board, Ciena's
Speaker 1: Climate change correspondent on this special edition of the climate conversations,
Speaker 1: I bring you stories of ecosystems at risk.
Speaker 1: This week I traveled to Nepal to meet villages on
Speaker 1: the brink of dying out. This is Asia's great climate frontiers.
Speaker 1: The passage into Sam jong is a dramatic one. The
Speaker 1: mountainside settlement emerges through a deep canyon flanked by sculpted
Speaker 1: red mineral cliffs, snowcapped peaks in the distance encircled village
Speaker 1: situated just kilometers from the Nepal border with Tibet.
Speaker 1: This is land enriched by culture and myth, part of
Speaker 1: Upper Mustang. A place once known as the country's last
Speaker 1: forbidden kingdom. Long isolated and still protected as a conservation area.
Speaker 1: It's a beautiful place. I can feel the freshness of
Speaker 1: the cool air,
Speaker 1: but the idyllic scene is not all that it seems
Speaker 1: in recent years, the longtime residents of this village have
Speaker 1: been heading for the exit,
Speaker 1: the small trickle of fresh water in a dusty riverbed.
Speaker 1: Nearby is a clue to what's happened here.
Speaker 1: So too were the parched fields. The empty livestock circles
Speaker 1: and the houses with padlocks on their doors
Speaker 1: song is running dry and the families that have called
Speaker 1: at home for generations have become a new breed of
Speaker 1: climate migrants in the Himalayas
Speaker 1: for as long as locals can remember a distant glacier
Speaker 1: has fed a spring under the mountains. The annual melting
Speaker 1: of glaciers during warmer months is a normal process that
Speaker 1: sustains life in these remote areas,
Speaker 1: but that natural tap has become irregular and unreliable. Many
Speaker 1: families have abandoned sam jong. Already
Speaker 1: nine remain though those left behind are overwhelmingly the elderly
Speaker 1: like bucky. A woman I met unwilling to uproot in
Speaker 1: their final years.
Speaker 1: Bucky has lived here basically her entire life. She explained
Speaker 1: to me what exactly was going on.
Speaker 2: The water is getting less and less. We have so
Speaker 2: few fields that we can plant. Now look at our fields,
Speaker 2: they're all dry now the irrigation channel is also broken.
Speaker 2: We used to keep a lot of animals. The horses
Speaker 2: had their stables in the village, the cows used to
Speaker 2: graze all over the fields and now there are fewer
Speaker 2: and fewer animals.
Speaker 2: I'm 65 now. So you can tell how long I
Speaker 2: have lived here. Others have moved because in the summers
Speaker 2: due to increasing rain, we have these flash floods coming
Speaker 2: down the cliffs and then the water sources also drying
Speaker 2: up also. The water is salty and so you can
Speaker 2: get belly problems when you drink it.
Speaker 2: Now our families are split between the two villagers in
Speaker 2: the summer. The kids come around, but my daughter and
Speaker 2: others are there and we're stuck here. It used to
Speaker 2: be nice. Were quite lonely. Now
Speaker 1: bucky's daughter sang mo joined the exodus. She and her
Speaker 1: family live in a new village a day's walk from
Speaker 1: life here is different.
Speaker 1: The place is dusty, the fields are less productive winds
Speaker 1: whip up dust from the roads and long neglected fields.
Speaker 1: In the four years since the first re settlers arrived,
Speaker 1: the community has been working together to make the area
Speaker 1: more viable for raising animals and planting crops. I can
Speaker 1: see the progress, but it's also clear that this town
Speaker 1: isn't a mountain paradise like their old place.
Speaker 1: Speaking to, I can sense the emotional lament about the
Speaker 1: physical distance between her and her mother now. But this
Speaker 1: was a matter of survival.
Speaker 2: When we first had to leave, I was heartbroken and
Speaker 2: more so by the thought that our Children were going
Speaker 2: to have a tougher future somewhere new in this barren land.
Speaker 2: But now that we have started living here, it's not
Speaker 2: so bad.
Speaker 2: I keep worrying if my mother is ill or how
Speaker 2: she's doing and so I suggested she sell her goats
Speaker 2: and move here with us. But all the older people
Speaker 2: say that they want to keep living there.
Speaker 1: The situation in Upper Mustang is the result of complex
Speaker 1: changes to the water systems in the Himalayas this year.
Speaker 1: Scientists reported that about 40% of the region's glacial mass
Speaker 1: has been lost since the little ice age, a period
Speaker 1: 400 to 700 years ago. The rate of melting in
Speaker 1: recent decades is up to 10 times faster than previously
Speaker 1: and the root cause is global warming
Speaker 1: at the same time. Climate change is triggering more extreme
Speaker 1: rain and snow events with potential cascading consequences including floods,
Speaker 1: landslides and lake outbursts. Mahjong has repeatedly experienced flash flooding.
Speaker 1: Another one of the reasons many of its residents chose
Speaker 1: to leave
Speaker 1: worryingly, many of these shifts occurring in the Himalayas cannot
Speaker 1: be reversed soon as Miriam Jackson from the International Center
Speaker 1: for Integrated Mountain Development told me in Kathmandu, she's the
Speaker 1: program coordinator for the Cryo Sphere Initiative, which is studying
Speaker 1: climate impacts on high altitude areas
Speaker 2: as the glaciers get smaller. First of all, there's more
Speaker 2: enough and then after that there's less runoff. But some glaciers,
Speaker 2: smaller glaciers have already reached the point where there's less runoff.
Speaker 2: So some communities are already seeing this, that the water
Speaker 2: is getting less and less and you can adapt it
Speaker 2: to a certain point, but after a while you can't
Speaker 2: adapt anymore. You know, even if we stop
Speaker 2: all the emissions were basically locked into a certain amount
Speaker 2: of change. We have to try and slow things down.
Speaker 2: That's the main thing is to slow things down because
Speaker 2: we can't stop it. And at the same time, we
Speaker 2: have to look for ways to adapt to it that
Speaker 2: we know these changes are coming and going to increase,
Speaker 2: you know, to the end of the century at least,
Speaker 1: experts say. If nations don't reduce global emissions moving communities
Speaker 1: will become more common at current rates. The Himalayas could
Speaker 1: lose two thirds of its glaciers by 2100. I spoke
Speaker 1: with dr region back to chaos to from Kathmandu University.
Speaker 1: I think the sifting of the whole villages gradually is
Speaker 1: the only one option.
Speaker 1: We can do some other options also like the rainwater harvesting,
Speaker 1: but that may not be enough for them and it
Speaker 1: will be more costly Also. Yes, some people don't want
Speaker 1: to move from their original place, but first we have
Speaker 1: to survive only then we can go to the other
Speaker 1: like social sense, other religious cultures. First we have to
Speaker 1: survive for that we need water if no water. I
Speaker 1: think the shifting is the ultimate goal lighting
Speaker 1: in upper mustang too much water is also a threat.
Speaker 1: The evidence of a deadly flood is a daily site
Speaker 1: in the village of chaucer.
Speaker 1: The riverbed here resembles a rocky moonscape entirely littered with
Speaker 1: thousands of white stones bounced down from mountains decades ago.
Speaker 1: I've never seen anything like it.
Speaker 1: This community was in the strike zone of a suspected
Speaker 1: glacial lake outburst floods or gloss off in the 1980s.
Speaker 1: After widespread damage, family relocations and a number of casualties,
Speaker 1: the fear still, lingers.
Speaker 1: Get up a local resident wandered out into the rockfall
Speaker 1: area to tell me about those scary days in the past.
Speaker 1: The flood took away so many people, houses and livestock.
Speaker 1: It was such a tragedy. The flood brought all of
Speaker 1: this all this used to be fields before there were
Speaker 1: 32 families living in houses across the river.
Speaker 1: They all got swept away all the belongings along with
Speaker 1: people got taken away. Now you see all these rocks
Speaker 1: that the floods brought. So people live in fear because
Speaker 1: they have already been to deadly floods. There are fears
Speaker 1: a third one might arrive. It's dangerous. While locals cannot
Speaker 1: be certain of the precise cause of such damaging events.
Speaker 1: Climate science spells out reasons for the instability in the
Speaker 1: earth and atmosphere in the Himalayas
Speaker 1: with abnormal annual melts due to global temperature rise, glaciers
Speaker 1: at high altitudes are feeding massive amounts of water into
Speaker 1: surrounding lakes.
Speaker 1: The risk of these lakes collapsing in a phenomenon called
Speaker 1: a cloth has communities throughout the region on edge.
Speaker 1: Today, Nepal has 21 potentially dangerous glacial lakes high up
Speaker 1: in the mountains. They're difficult to monitor.
Speaker 1: I wanted to see one for myself
Speaker 1: with my nepali fixer, I take off on foot headed
Speaker 1: for a mysterious lake high up in the mist, we
Speaker 1: trek uphill on slippery rocks. Hour after hour, the altitude
Speaker 1: starting to heap the pressure on my skull and leaving
Speaker 1: me breathless. The cold is relentless. Every step becomes a
Speaker 1: struggle
Speaker 1: at 5400 m above sea level, about a similar altitude
Speaker 1: to Mount Everest base camp. Finally, the aqua marine lake emerges.
Speaker 1: It's a moment of small triumph for me and the
Speaker 1: lake is beautiful in its fragility.
Speaker 1: It was probably the toughest physical challenge I've ever undertaken,
Speaker 1: what I take from it, how profound the impacts of
Speaker 1: climate change can be on places. People simply do not
Speaker 1: visit or think about
Speaker 1: and what happens in parts of the Himalayas. We cannot
Speaker 1: see matters to more than a handful of small villages
Speaker 1: throughout south Asia, huge populations depend on glacial melt and
Speaker 1: river flow for their drinking water and irrigation.
Speaker 1: The risk of looming disasters is high,
Speaker 1: Pakistan, home to more than 7200 glaciers has been devastated
Speaker 1: recently by extreme flooding, amplified by climate change. As early
Speaker 1: snowmelt combined with heavy seasonal rainfall in 2022 meltwater peak
Speaker 1: met the monsoon peak, a scenario that could easily repeat
Speaker 1: more frequently as weather patterns shift
Speaker 1: before I leave Nepal, I'm lucky enough to attend a
Speaker 1: special ceremony in a local family's home Across the Himalayas,
Speaker 1: ceremonies like this are a call to the gods of nature,
Speaker 1: locals pray for good weather ahead
Speaker 1: but the future is cloudy and further crises are expected,
Speaker 1: meaning a return to the ways of the past is unlikely.
Speaker 1: This has been Jack Board, Thank you for listening to
Speaker 1: this special episode of the climate conversations. The team behind
Speaker 1: this podcast are Christina robert, Jacqueline chan, daniel lee, Joanne
Speaker 1: chan and Tiffany Young