Nepal´s growing environmental pain
Surya B. Prasai
March 31, 2008
This week the Bangkok Climate Change talks take place between 31 March to 4 April 2008 at the United Nations Conference Centre (UNCC) of the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP). The talks in which Nepal will also participate as a principal signatory of the UNFCCC´s Bali Pact will focus on the long term cooperative action and further commitments to the Kyoto Protocol. It will try to advance the Bali Road map and to highlight what is considered a stronger developing country perspective on country response strategies to the overall Bali commitments.
After the Bali summit, held in the first and second weeks of December 2007, Nepali environmentalists came back with the jubilant announcement, " We have now signed the Bali pact." Bali after all was the first major global summit to discuss climate change and how it affects the worldīs future populations. Nepalīs ´environmentalists´ even commented on how happy they were that some of the delegates mentioned their country by name at least from the humanitarian standpoint of how a civil conflict had taken excruciating toll on the national environment. Many industrialized countries did promise to help Nepal, but then these have to be tied up to some bilateral modicum of aid and program signatures and usually that volume of aid that trickles down in the end is not worthy of international mention.
The stark truth is: Nepal´s environmental pains are growing day by day. After a decade long civil conflict between 1996-2006, Nepal´s environmental vital statistics have shown major strains and a socio-economic regression which is further exacerbated with a tourism boom and shifting migration patterns. Everything that was built in the past three decades with the involvement of early donors such as the USAID and UN were totally damaged in every sense of the environmental word. Today Nepal has an unchecked tourism boom which shows no signs of abating with average tourism growth in the past year at 40%. There has been an increase in air passenger traffic of nearly37%, and in migration to Kathmandu is nearly 32% in the past half decade, just to cite an urban setting. International airline pilots complain that visibility is so bad even on fair days at the southern in-track Bhatte Danda radar way point to Kathmandu´s Tribhuvan International Airport, that the airport is not worthy of a Visual Flight Approach routing. Within Kathmandu, Nepal´s enchanting capital, pollution must be inhaled mercifully exceeding WHO limitations, as if those barriers were meant to be broken. There is a thick layer of smog that covers major Nepali townships these days not just Kathmandu.
To add to Nepal´s environmental degradation which had gone unchecked, one must consider the agricultural encroachment, deforestation, soil erosion, contamination of water supply, and unsurpassed migration into mid-hill townships and cities that has put local environmental pressures on the local community. Nearly 54% of the Nepali population lives under US$2 and 33% among them under US$1. Between mid-1960s and the late 1970s, Nepali forestland lessened from 30% to 22% in total acreages since firewood was then being used by over 90% of the population. Soil erosion is causing the loss of about 240 million cubic meters of topsoil erosion each year. The Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN estimates that at the present rate of depletion, the forests will be virtually wiped out by 2015. Air and water pollution are also significant environmental problems in Nepal airline pilots complain that Kathmandu valley is always covered with a layer of air pollution.
According to United Nations sources, Nepal produces 18,000 tons of carbon monoxide and 3,300 tons of hydrocarbons per year. Roughly one-third of the nation's city inhabitants and two-thirds of all rural dwellers do not have pure water, and the use of contaminated drinking water creates a health hazard. Untreated sewage is a major pollution factor: the nation's cities produce an average of 0.7 million tons of solid waste per year. Nepal īs pro-green environment lobby has estimated that in 2007, 34 of Nepal´s mammal species and 42 of its bird species were endangered, as were 11 plant species. Some of the animal species classified as endangered in Nepal include the snow leopard, tiger, Asian elephant, pygmy hog, great Indian rhinoceros, Assam rabbit, swamp deer, wild yak, chirr pheasant, and gavial. No one has done an accurate study to date.
Nepal does host the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development(ICIMOD) which fosters regional concerns in protecting the Himalayan ecology of nearly two dozen countries covered by the unique geographic belt, including the Asia-Pacific region´s two most powerful countries, India and China.
Why this new concern? One should note, Nepal with the other governing parties agreed at Bali to formally launch negotiations on enabling the full, effective and sustained implementation of the Bali Convention. These negotiations needed to conclude on an agreed outcome by the end of 2009. The Bali Summitīs challenge was basically to design a future agreement that will successfully halt the increase in global emissions within the next 10-15 years, dramatically cut back emissions by 2050, and do so in a way that it is economically viable and politically equitable worldwide. The fact is, the Protocol which is the baby of the 1997 UN conference held in Kyoto, Japan, requires nations to reduce carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gasses emitted by power plants and other industrial, agricultural and transportation sources to at least five per cent below 1990 levels by 2008-12, which is well nigh impossible. In Bali, a total of 174 nations ratified the pact; however, none has achieved it.
Therefore, in Bangkok, the global delegates who again assemble to take stock of the Kyoto Protocol must understand that the future of smaller countries should not be forgotten. It is clearly mentioned by UNEP and the UNFCCC that the Himalayan ecology is also one of the highly threatened regions on earth. For Nepal and organizations that have been helping promote the country´ environmental cause such as USAID, DFID, GTZ, the UN agencies, the current dilemma is: if climate change is unchecked particularly given the geo-strategic Nepal occupies in the Hindu-Kush Himalayas, it could mean the cause of major world depletion, the Himalayan glaciers. Some change has already been noticed in the glacial movements in the Himalayas in the past decade and some of the Himalayan lakes have over spilt their natural mountain embankments threatening floods and mass migration. Right now, biologists are focused on what would be the outcome of this on plant and human species. But weather experts see this as an irreversible trend. Nepal should be a country of major concern to global climate change theorists. If Nepal´s environment continues to suffer the pangs of human environmental depletion at unchecked levels, it could mean the permanent damage to the mid-Mountain ecology and the Terai agricultural lands where nearly 90% of the population lives. It is already creating problems for farmers due to over moisture content in the alluvial soil, trapping water levels across Nepali and Indian villages during the monsoon, and the drowning of entire villages in Bangladesh leading to huge deaths, economic loss, and low yield agriculture.
After the Bali summit, held in the first and second weeks of December 2007, Nepali environmentalists came back with the jubilant announcement, " We have now signed the Bali pact." Bali after all was the first major global summit to discuss climate change and how it affects the worldīs future populations. Nepalīs ´environmentalists´ even commented on how happy they were that some of the delegates mentioned their country by name at least from the humanitarian standpoint of how a civil conflict had taken excruciating toll on the national environment. Many industrialized countries did promise to help Nepal, but then these have to be tied up to some bilateral modicum of aid and program signatures and usually that volume of aid that trickles down in the end is not worthy of international mention.
The stark truth is: Nepal´s environmental pains are growing day by day. After a decade long civil conflict between 1996-2006, Nepal´s environmental vital statistics have shown major strains and a socio-economic regression which is further exacerbated with a tourism boom and shifting migration patterns. Everything that was built in the past three decades with the involvement of early donors such as the USAID and UN were totally damaged in every sense of the environmental word. Today Nepal has an unchecked tourism boom which shows no signs of abating with average tourism growth in the past year at 40%. There has been an increase in air passenger traffic of nearly37%, and in migration to Kathmandu is nearly 32% in the past half decade, just to cite an urban setting. International airline pilots complain that visibility is so bad even on fair days at the southern in-track Bhatte Danda radar way point to Kathmandu´s Tribhuvan International Airport, that the airport is not worthy of a Visual Flight Approach routing. Within Kathmandu, Nepal´s enchanting capital, pollution must be inhaled mercifully exceeding WHO limitations, as if those barriers were meant to be broken. There is a thick layer of smog that covers major Nepali townships these days not just Kathmandu.
To add to Nepal´s environmental degradation which had gone unchecked, one must consider the agricultural encroachment, deforestation, soil erosion, contamination of water supply, and unsurpassed migration into mid-hill townships and cities that has put local environmental pressures on the local community. Nearly 54% of the Nepali population lives under US$2 and 33% among them under US$1. Between mid-1960s and the late 1970s, Nepali forestland lessened from 30% to 22% in total acreages since firewood was then being used by over 90% of the population. Soil erosion is causing the loss of about 240 million cubic meters of topsoil erosion each year. The Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN estimates that at the present rate of depletion, the forests will be virtually wiped out by 2015. Air and water pollution are also significant environmental problems in Nepal airline pilots complain that Kathmandu valley is always covered with a layer of air pollution.
According to United Nations sources, Nepal produces 18,000 tons of carbon monoxide and 3,300 tons of hydrocarbons per year. Roughly one-third of the nation's city inhabitants and two-thirds of all rural dwellers do not have pure water, and the use of contaminated drinking water creates a health hazard. Untreated sewage is a major pollution factor: the nation's cities produce an average of 0.7 million tons of solid waste per year. Nepal īs pro-green environment lobby has estimated that in 2007, 34 of Nepal´s mammal species and 42 of its bird species were endangered, as were 11 plant species. Some of the animal species classified as endangered in Nepal include the snow leopard, tiger, Asian elephant, pygmy hog, great Indian rhinoceros, Assam rabbit, swamp deer, wild yak, chirr pheasant, and gavial. No one has done an accurate study to date.
Nepal does host the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development(ICIMOD) which fosters regional concerns in protecting the Himalayan ecology of nearly two dozen countries covered by the unique geographic belt, including the Asia-Pacific region´s two most powerful countries, India and China.
Why this new concern? One should note, Nepal with the other governing parties agreed at Bali to formally launch negotiations on enabling the full, effective and sustained implementation of the Bali Convention. These negotiations needed to conclude on an agreed outcome by the end of 2009. The Bali Summitīs challenge was basically to design a future agreement that will successfully halt the increase in global emissions within the next 10-15 years, dramatically cut back emissions by 2050, and do so in a way that it is economically viable and politically equitable worldwide. The fact is, the Protocol which is the baby of the 1997 UN conference held in Kyoto, Japan, requires nations to reduce carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gasses emitted by power plants and other industrial, agricultural and transportation sources to at least five per cent below 1990 levels by 2008-12, which is well nigh impossible. In Bali, a total of 174 nations ratified the pact; however, none has achieved it.
Therefore, in Bangkok, the global delegates who again assemble to take stock of the Kyoto Protocol must understand that the future of smaller countries should not be forgotten. It is clearly mentioned by UNEP and the UNFCCC that the Himalayan ecology is also one of the highly threatened regions on earth. For Nepal and organizations that have been helping promote the country´ environmental cause such as USAID, DFID, GTZ, the UN agencies, the current dilemma is: if climate change is unchecked particularly given the geo-strategic Nepal occupies in the Hindu-Kush Himalayas, it could mean the cause of major world depletion, the Himalayan glaciers. Some change has already been noticed in the glacial movements in the Himalayas in the past decade and some of the Himalayan lakes have over spilt their natural mountain embankments threatening floods and mass migration. Right now, biologists are focused on what would be the outcome of this on plant and human species. But weather experts see this as an irreversible trend. Nepal should be a country of major concern to global climate change theorists. If Nepal´s environment continues to suffer the pangs of human environmental depletion at unchecked levels, it could mean the permanent damage to the mid-Mountain ecology and the Terai agricultural lands where nearly 90% of the population lives. It is already creating problems for farmers due to over moisture content in the alluvial soil, trapping water levels across Nepali and Indian villages during the monsoon, and the drowning of entire villages in Bangladesh leading to huge deaths, economic loss, and low yield agriculture.
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