New Delhi, Sept. 29 -- As I write this, over 1,300 lives are confirmed lost and many thousands are still missing in the floods in Nepal, as the mighty Himalayas came down as rubble. This is an enormous and painful human tragedy, but it is also about wilful actions and inactions of humans. It is about our mindset, the belief that we can re-engineer everything; that we are in control of the universe and all things in it. This is on us.
Let me break this down. What happened in Nepal on August 26? The images are of the mountain coming down as the flash flood and massive quantity of debris buried everything in its path. We know now that this flash flood was not caused by an extreme cloudburst. It was triggered by the collapse of a high-altitude glacier near the Langtang Lirung peak. An estimated 142 million cubic metres of ice and rocks were dislodged, creating a 5.2 magnitude seismic event. This led to the formation of natural dams, behind which water and moraine accumulated. When the dams broke, they unleashed devastating floods downstream.
Why? There is no single headline reason, but two events have greatly contributed to this and other such tragedies. One is the well-documented warming caused by climate change. It is literally weakening the Himalayas-the temperature rise melts glaciers; this, in turn, corrodes the moraine slopes. It is a ticking bomb. In addition, climate change is leading to increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, bringing flood and landslide catastrophes.
We are complicit in this, particularly the countries that have contributed the most to the stock of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which is driving up temperatures. There is no getting away from the historical responsibility of the richest and most developed countries. UNEP estimates that the world will overshoot the 1.5degC threshold within a few years. Scientists know that beyond 1.5degC, the impacts would be cascading and even more devastating-from the collapse of ice sheets to disruptions in ocean currents. Yet, we seem sanguine about this breakdown in our Earth's system.
Let's get back to the Himalayas. We know that the climate change ticking bomb is exacerbated by the "nature" of development in these ecological hotspots. We talk ad nauseam about adaptation and taking the changing climate into account, but we never do. In the Indian Himalayas, hydroelectric project after project is coming up, literally back-to-back, so that the Ganga is re-engineered. Then we are tunnelling into mountains and building roads, often without provision for slope management.
But the fact is we are not hearing the message that nature is giving us, loud and clear: change your mindset. Your thinking that you can dominate me, bring me to my knees, will not work. Change or perish is the message. The question is whether we can hear it amid the cacophony of our distractions.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.