The Tribune: A collective scientific approach is required for mitigating the impact of climate change which is one of the most serious social, economic and environmental challenges facing humanity. This was discussed at an international conference on “Climate Change: Opportunities and Challenges” held at the National University of Science and Technology here on Wednesday. The [...]

Alertnet: At present, close to one billion people suffer from hunger. Experts agree that there is a high risk of climate change affecting food security at the global level, with the most negative impacts in the poorest and most vulnerable countries. The additional risk of climate change could put several hundred million at risk of [...]

Dawn Pakistan: Speakers at a workshop here on Thursday said that glacier lake outburst floods (GLOF) were posing threat to Hindukush-Himalya region that could play havoc with human settlements. They stressed the need for taking steps to reduce the risk. The workshop titled ‘Reducing risks and vulnerabilities from glacier outburst floods in northern Pakistan’ was [...]

IPS News: As a result of climate change-related extreme weather events like a rise in the sea level and increasingly intense storms alternating with drought, Caribbean island nations are facing the challenge of adopting adaptation measures that could be too costly for their budgets. One important message from the report is that costly investments are [...]

UN Solution Exchange: The query on ‘Flood resistant tree crops for ensuring food security’ was floated by UN Solution Exchange India to its members. The responses got are interesting one and could be replicated in the mountains as well. The UNSE members opined that though India has rich traditional knowledge and wisdom to mitigate disasters, [...]

RTCC: Pakistan has launched its first climate change adaptation project aimed at tackling the threats communities face from bursting glacier lakes in the country’s northern mountains. With Northern Pakistan being home to 5,218 glaciers and 2420 glacial lakes – 52 of which have been classified as potentially dangerous – the two year pilot project is [...]

Daily Times: Say 52 glaciers in mountainous regions have dangerous tendencies ISLAMABAD: Speaking at a seminar, environment experts highlighted that 52 glaciers in mountainous regions of Pakistan have dangerous tendencies and warned of more disasters like Attabad Lake and recent avalanche in Gayari area of Siachen. They were expressing their views at the media launch [...]

DAWN (Islamabad): At least 52 glacial lakes in Gilgit and Astore districts have been identified as ‘potentially dangerous’ by a project sponsored by the European Union and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The project report titled “Managing climate risks in the Himalayas: A community-centric approach” says that in the sub-basins of Swat, Chitral, Gilgit, Hunza, [...]

KuenselOnline: This is the  sixteen article on the GLOF research and mitigation project between May 2009 and March 2012.  The articles will highlight latest findings on glacier, glacial lakes condition and natural hazards in the Bhutan Himalayas. Experts from the department of geology and mines (DGM), Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and Japan Science and [...]

Times of India And Business Recorder: The productivity of staple grain wheat could decline by upto 18% by 2020 due to adverse impact of climate change which is causing rise in temperature, Parliament was informed today. The yield of another major food crop rice might also fall by up to 6 per cent by 2020, [...]

Guardian- Associated Press in Washington: Prepare for unprecedented onslaught of deadly weather disasters, report says, claiming global warming causing crisis. Global warming is leading to such severe storms, droughts and heatwaves that nations should prepare for an unprecedented onslaught of deadly and costly weather disasters, an international panel of scientists has said. The greatest danger [...]

The Himalayan ecosystem is fragile and diverse. It includes over 51 million people who practice hill agriculture and remains vulnerable The Himalayan ecosystem is vital to the ecological security of the Indian landmass, through providing forest cover, feeding perennial rivers that are the source of drinking water, irrigation, and hydropower, conserving biodiversity, providing a rich [...]

The claim that global warming and climate change aren’t real gets increasingly ridiculous each year. For one, the science just makes it so much more obvious as it develops (but, truthfully, it’s been obvious for years). Additionally, the real-world climate disasters just keep increasing. In the past two years, for example, 42 million Asians have [...]

UNDP (2010) Why water, including GLOFs, is a key sector for the country-Nepal? Water resources play an important role in the overall development of Nepal. Nepal has a theoretical hydropower potential of about 83,000 MW. The source of livelihoods of majority of the population is agriculture. Both of these sectors are heavily dependent on water [...]

Sacred natural sites are areas of land or water having special spiritual significance. And the Eastern Himalayas is home to many such sites like Mount Kailash (Tibet), Lumbini (Nepal), Taksang (Bhutan), Gosaikunda (Nepal), Gurudongmar Lake (Sikkim). These sites besides having spiritual and religious significance also have biodiversity conservation value due to restrictions on cutting of [...]

New Delhi: Farmers in the South-Indian state of Tamil Nadu are switching from paddy cultivation to panning for salt. On the other extreme of the sub-continent, hundreds of thousands of people live in harm’s way in the event of a glacial lake outburst-triggered flood, or GLOFs as they are called.   Something sinister connects the [...]

Natural disasters in Asia in 2011 could well prove to be the costliest ever, experts say. “Never before has this world suffered so much economic loss due to natural disaster, most of which has been in Asia and the Pacific,” Sanjay Srivastava, UN regional adviser for disaster risk reduction, told IRIN in Bangkok. Of the [...]

Noreen Haider: It has been more than six years when the Northern areas of Pakistan were hit by one of the most devastating earthquake in the history of the region. The earthquake measured 7.6 on the Richter scale and within the very few first seconds created an unimaginable devastation in an area of more than [...]

Earlier this month, Bangladesh’s foreign minister chided the world’s developed nations for failing to honor their pledge to help this low-lying, water-logged nation adapt to the effects of climate change. Of the $30 billion that poor countries were promised three years ago, just $2.5 billion have been disbursed. “Our achievements — social, economic, environmental — [...]

BEN: Australia’s infrastructure is not prepared to withstand the consequences of catastrophic climate change events such as floods, droughts, coastal erosion, tropical cyclones, fires and seal level rise. The report released today calls on all stakeholders to address regulatory frameworks gaps, which are acting as barriers towards effective climate adaptation. It analyses the extent to [...]

DAWN: In Pakistan, 3.57 billion dollars need to be spent in the coming 18 years to deal with the affects of climate change Pakistan, Guatemala and Russia have been the countries worst hit by climate change in the recent past, with thousands of lives lost to extreme weather events. In addition to being the worst-affected, [...]

Business Recorder: Pakistan is losing cumulatively $1 billion per day due to the environmental degradation while the successive governments have never given serious attention to the issue. This was the crux of the seminar on “Strategic Environmental Assessment – in the context of Framework for Economic Growth – Taking the bull by the horns” organised [...]

Environmental Expert: An ensemble of climate and weather simulations could help developing countries better prepare for extreme events such as tropical cyclones, droughts and floods, scientists have said. Many poorer countries rely on traditional weather forecasting techniques, in which an initial set of weather conditions is fed into a single model to predict future adverse [...]

Click Green: A sequence of devastating earthquakes and a large number of weather-related catastrophes made 2011 the costliest year ever in terms of natural catastrophe losses. Estimates of around US$380bn in global economic losses were nearly two-thirds higher than in 2005, the previous record year with losses of $220bn. The earthquakes in Japan in March [...]

Throughout 2011 we have seen  some of the extreme weather effects of climate change stinging. Global warming means killer storms more worse than Katrina and Gustav, unexpected flooding in Asia, drought in Eastern Europe, unseasonal heavy rains in western Africa. These events  have also reduced crop yields, further hampering the chances of relief. 2012 will [...]

Japan Times: Rising, warming and increasingly acidic seas threaten the very survival of Pacific island countries. The retreat of glaciers and snowfields in the Himalaya and Tibetan Plateau jeopardize these “water towers” on which 1 billion Asians depend for flows during the dry season and drought years. More than 450 million Asians live within the [...]

Kuenselonline: Environment Large types of glaciers in the Bhutan Himalaya are covered with rock debris at the lower part.  Terminus of those glaciers is surrounded by huge moraines, which were formed by rocks flowing down with glacier ice during the Little Ice Age.  Glaciers have expanded, and their surfaces have reached at the height of [...]

Mission to reduce chances of glacial lake’s outburst fails to achieve target. The Thorthormi glacial lake in northern Bhutan is considered the country’s likeliest climate-induced disaster. The lake, perched at a height of more than 4,400 metres, is swelling because of melting ice, and is in danger of bursting its wall. Efforts by the Bhutanese [...]

On November 18, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report, Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters, claiming that scientists are “virtually certain” the world will have more extreme heat spells. By 2050, heat waves could be in the range of 5 degrees hotter, and 9 degrees by 2100. This increase [...]

Everestindanger: UNESCO committee meets in SA Sir Edmund Hillary has joined environmental campaigners and lawyers in urging the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, who are meeting in Durban, South Africa this week (10-17 July), to place Mount Everest on the UN endangered list because of the impacts of climate change [1]. The World Heritage Convention legally [...]

Kuenselonline: Environment Most of the Bhutanese rivers flow down to the south from the glacierized headwaters. These glacierized areas consist of rocky peaks, streams, lakes, snow and ice, which are breathtakingly beautiful scenery and sometimes hazardous. However, it is difficult to see such landscapes from the foot of the mountain except a few of local [...]

Sunday Morning Herald: CLIMATE change was supposed to be ”the greatest moral challenge of our time”, as the former prime minister Kevin Rudd put it, but it was pigeon excrement that caused headaches for Nigel Jamieson. Inspired by the 2009 Copenhagen climate change conference, Jamieson’s As The World Tipped features a stage that slowly becomes [...]

Bangkok Post: Rising, warming and increasingly acidic seas threaten the very survival of Pacific island countries. The retreat of glaciers and snowfields in the Himalaya and Tibetan Plateau jeopardise these “water towers” on which one billion Asians depend for dry season and drought year flows. More than 450 million Asians live within the low-elevation coastal [...]

New York City–and other major metropolises around the globe–face an epic challenge in coping with the impacts of global warming. Here is how climate change could shut down a city: On the morning of August 8, 2007, a thunderstorm paralyzed the largest rail transit system in the U.S.—New York City’s subway—during morning rush hour. Flash [...]

Bangkok Post: A city once famous for its extensive network of canals, known locally as khlongs, Bangkok had long since been filled over to make way for an ever-expanding network of roads in this rapidly modernising city of 12 million people. Across the developing world, the pressure on cities to build new industrial, commercial, residential [...]

Mongabay: The year 2011 has presented the world with a shocking increase in irregular weather and disasters linked to climate change. Just as the 2007 “big melt” of summer arctic sea ice sent scientists and environmentalists scrambling to re-evaluate the severity of climate change, so have recent events forced major revisions and updates in climate [...]

Pakistan has been warned of frequent floods of disastrous nature like the ones that battered the country in 2010 and 2011 in the Indus river owing to rapid glacier retreat and shifting of monsoonal zones by about 100 kilometres towards northwest regions. In a recent communication it sent to the government, the Asian Development Bank [...]

University world News: Pakistan has been hit by massive floods many times and once by a severe earthquake that killed more than 100,000 people. These, and numerous other problems the country faces, have raised questions about the role of universities. Concern is growing that most courses taught at universities are irrelevant to Pakistan’s social and [...]

The Nations: Over one billion migrants across the globe have remitted an estimated $ 404 billion in the ongoing year while they face a plethora of problems amid largely negative public opinion and related social, political and economic factors, says an annual report. The World Migration Report 2011, released by the International Organisation for Migration [...]

Pakistan Journal of Meteorology: The Himalayas, Karakoram and Hindukush lofty mountain ranges meet each other in Pakistan hosting more than 5000 glaciers in Pakistani geographical limits which feed snow/ice melt water to the Indus River System together with summer monsoon. Due to global warming, frozen water resources have been losing their reserves at an unprecedented [...]

Hydropower dams in Himalayas, marketed as clean energy that will earn developers cash credits under carbon-offsetting Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) scheme, appear to fall well short of their goals in Himachal Pradesh where global climate change mitigation goals conflicts with local sustainable development, as a study by German researchers has found out. Recently published in [...]

Good Environment: This graph from the  Energy Information Administration communicates the reality of renewable energy in America better than any other single source. Renewable energy covers only a small slice, 8 percent, of the country’s needs. And despite the focus on biofuels and solar power, the chart shows that more than a third of that slice [...]

IPS: South Africa, Nov 30, 2011: Managing the impact of increased disasters due to climate change will only be possible if such efforts are led by local communities, say non-governmental organisations working in climate change. “We cannot use the excuse of money – or the lack of it – not to do anything. Yes, developed [...]

National Geographic: Google Earth Shows How Dams Could Worsen Climate Change. A project of two NGOs highlights far-ranging effects of damming rivers which is a new interactive Google Earth video tour aims to teach people how damming rivers around the world can exacerbate climate change. The video, created by the nonprofit conservation groups International Rivers [...]

NICCD: Leadership plays a crucial role within processes of change and transformation, particularly those associated with the impacts of climate change and variability. In vulnerable developing contexts affected by more frequent and intense climatic events, local leaders are key in the adoption of innovation and learning, as well as in the capacity of vulnerable groups [...]

The New York Times: With its massive chalk-white face of ice and snow, Thorthormi glacier in northern Bhutan looms high against a bright blue sky, nearly 4,450 meters above sea level. At the glacier’s base, a wide lake of murky water completes the dramatic scene at the rooftop of the world. But the beauty of [...]

IPS: Chungda Sherpa, a former herder from eastern Nepal, has a warning tale ahead of the United Nations climate change conference in Durban. At World Wildlife Fund-Japan’s ‘Climate Witness’ programme in Osaka and Tokyo this month, to apprise communities around the world how climate change is threatening lives and livelihoods, the 48-year-old described how the [...]

NDTV India (Video): The video not only raises important questions about one of the Indian Himalayan States, its few Tributaries (Rivers) or about saving the lives of a few Mountain Dwellers, but, it is about status of Himalayas and Hindustan (India) itself. This very interesting video was released by NDTV India on 18 November 2011  [...]

Washington Post: Amid regional tensions, only 4 of 7 Himalayan nations meet for climate summit on the mountains. Four Himalayan nations, faced with erratic weather and the threat of melting glaciers and catastrophic floods, are hashing out a plan for preserving the vast mountain range and helping millions living in the foothills cope with climate [...]

Hindustan Times: Real-time SMS alert for farmers on impact of climate variation on crops. Farmers now get an alert on their mobile phones of sudden climate variations that can harm their crops. This is one of the innovative projects taken up by the central government to help farmers adapt to climate change in the country’s [...]

Eurasia Review: Time has come to become serious about the future of the river. There is a growing perception that the Ganga might completely dry in next fifty years if no effective action is taken to purify the river, keep the flow of its water intact and control the global warming. There cannot be a [...]

UNDP Regional Centre: As a matter of national urgency, the Bhutanese Government – with assistance from an international climate change adaptation fund that was established by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and partner organizations such as the United Nations Development Programme, the Global Environment Facility, the World Wildlife Fund and the Government [...]

Kuenselonline: The Wangchu river that runs through Thimphu city, Bhutan’s biggest and fastest growing urban centre, is more polluted as it passes through the main town and flows downstream, a report prepared by the National Environment Commission concludes. The report collected data between March last year and April this year, from monitoring sites set up [...]

MRD Journal: The Indus River Basin is characterized by downstream areas with the world’s largest irrigation system, providing food and energy security to more than 215 million people. The arid to semiarid basin is classified as a net water deficit area, but it also suffers from devastating floods. Among the four basin countries, Pakistan is [...]

Practical Action: This briefing focuses on the impact of climate change on Nepal’s rural poor. A great deal has been written  on the challenges of providing clean energy and the risks to urban populations but, as this paper outlines, climate change also has many other consequences. Rural communities, whose livelihoods are intimately tied to the [...]

Business Recorder: The humanitarian emergency caused by the few last months’ devastating floods in Asia is a warning that the situation could get worse, The people affected by this crisis have lost everything, and their difficulties are only just beginning. Two countries Pakistan and Thailand have been badly hit by the disaster. Hundreds of thousands [...]

This has been an eventful year for natural calamities – drought in the Horn of Africa, floods yet again in Pakistan, and now also in Thailand. NGOs, think-tanks and scientific organizations eager to share their insights or shed some light on what could be causing these events have tried to keep pace with nature by [...]

Assam Tribune: The Planning Commission has accorded investment clearance to implement anti-erosion works to protect Brahmaputra dykes. This project is estimated to cost Rs 8.35 crore. The dyke works relate to 69 km (Uluberi) and 78 km (Borigaon). The proposed scheme envisages anti-erosion measures for a 9000-m long reach on the south bank of the [...]

WWF: Himalayan nations must move rapidly to commit to efforts that build resilience to the impacts of climate change and generate resources for adaptation, capacity building and technology transfer. The Himalayan glaciers are the water towers of Asia, and the source of many of the world’s great rivers: The Yangtze, the Ganges, the Indus and [...]

WWF-Nepal: A five-year program to reduce the adverse impacts of climate change and threats to biodiversity in Nepal, was officially launched at a ceremony in Kathmandu on 8 Nov 2011. The Hariyo Ban program is a new investment in biodiversity conservation in Nepal, funded by the US Agency for International Development​ (USAID). The program will [...]