Only Constant is (Climate) Change

Yash Veer Bhatnagar

Climate Change is Real!

A peaceful late spring morning in May 1992. I had begun my day-long watch on ibex behaviour in the Pin Valley National Park. There was not much activity in the herd—foraging, resting, foraging, resting, a few steps, foraging…and this continued. The bonus was that this was the season when ibex descended to the lowest parts of the valley at about 3800 m to take advantage of the early sprouts and were easy to approach rather close. Proximity and ‘acceptance’ from one’s study species is a lovely feeling. I could clearly see what they were foraging on, even count the number of bites on Oxytropis, Stipa, Lindelofia, Cicer and so on—some of these foraged only in this season. They would soon move to the top of the ridges, above 4800 m for the summer— better food there and less harassment from the pesty insects.

The monotony of the observations was suddenly broken by a booming reverberation that shook our comfortable perch under a small willow tree. We couldn’t place it for some time and then located the noise right behind us, across the Parahio river, from the Phooma nala, normally a trickle, now a black frothy slush, with boulders the size of my hut, tumbling down. I was shocked at the sheer ferocity of the spectacle. The Parahio was dammed for a bit and in one violent push the block was cleared by the furious river.

Through that year, we kept hearing such uproars and soon would find the river turn red, black, and purple, depending on which nala had a flash flood. Zangpo, my assistant and friend, who has grown up in the hamlet Gechang remembered very few such events since his childhood. These extreme events were surely on the rise. A few years later the arterial road into Pin valley was blocked by this huge debris that was washed down from the Kin nala. There was a large lake extending a kilometre upstream. Since the subsequent three decades working in the Western Himalaya, I have come across many such extreme events, sometimes even washing away villages, meadows, and livestock. The intensity and frequency of such events is rising and is threatening local people and development in the region.

People complain that winters are now generally less severe but snows in spring have increased. While the peak winter snow stays and thaws slowly in spring, the ‘wet’ spring snow is more destructive and causes erosion and such extreme events. Then, this‘ rain shadow’ of the Himalaya now had increasing monsoon rains in August-September. This was hardly any help for their crops that are normally harvested by mid-August but could, on the contrary, be destructive to the maturing crops. These rains were also too late to really help the pastures where senescence sets in by late August. Most flat roofed houses in the Trans Himalaya are made of sun- baked clay bricks that keep the temperature inside moderate due to better insulation compared to stone or concrete. But now, people find it more and more difficult to ‘sun bake’ the bricks and even if they manage, the new houses literally dissolve in the monsoons, even if it is just a persistent drizzle.

Studies by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, confirm these patterns of increasing temperatures and changing precipitation. Average temperature increase in the Western Himalaya is about 0.2°C per decade between 1951 and 2014. The estimate is substantially higher in the upper altitudes, above about 4000 m, where the same figure is 0.5°C per decade. Warming in the Himalayan region is projected to be in the range of 2.6-4.6 °C by the end of the 21st century. As a result, the third pole, that the Hindu Kush- Himalaya (HKH), is often called, is losing glacial extent, at the rate of 20 to 47 % since 2000, found a review by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, Kathmandu in 2019. Depending on topography and elevation, glaciers can lose anything from a few metres to close to 60 m per year: Gangotri is losing about 30 m per year since 2000. In other areas, the smaller glaciers, barely a few 100 m long, often more critical for local villages, may lose a larger proportion of their mass and can cause water scarcity for local people. In fact, farmers of Ladakh and Spiti increasingly face such scarcity when they are unable to irrigate their crops during sowing in early summer. This is a time when the small glaciers high up melt slowly and can’t provide enough water for the fields, and there is hardly any snow in the lower parts of the stream, thus forcing the farmers to leave more fields fallow. Climate change will further magnify declines in the snowfall and glacial extent leading to substantial scarcity of water for drinking and irrigation.

But not all is so bleak. In some areas farmers can capitalize on climate change and grow new remunerative cash crops or cereals at much higher elevations than possible just a few decades ago. The best examples are the farmers in Lahaul who can now cultivate apple, apricot, and cherry orchards apart from the lucrative iceberg lettuce, carrots and other ‘off season’ vegetables. This is fast transforming their economy for the better. Then, the Changpa nomads of Ladakh, who mostly rear sheep and the valuable pashmina goats year-round above 4200 m, now have incentives to settle down in places where the government has established schools and health facilities. They can now grow precious barley, so important for their ritual brew chang and staple flour, tsampa, something that was impossible just a few decades ago.

High Altitude Wildlife are Highly Specialized

Himalaya, the youngest and highest mountain range in the world, emerged after the Indian tectonic plate sub ducted under the Eurasian plate, giving rise to the Tibetan Plateau and the formidable 3000 km range extending from Myanmar in the east, to Afghanistan in the west. In geological timescales, the Himalaya sprang up rather fast beginning in the Palaeocene Epoch, about 65 million years, around the time when the dinosaurs went extinct and the Indian island was literally racing towards Asia, but mountain building intensified in the Miocene Epoch (ca. 23 to 5 million years ago) resulting in the grand mountain range we see today. In a largely warm world at that time, brand-new habitats were now suddenly available but very few species of plants and animals were adapted to survive in this extremely cold, dry, and rarefied atmosphere. These empty niches established a key centre for the evolution of highly adapted animals that included the woolly rhino, ancestors of sheep, goats, horses, and antelopes to develop in High Asia. These species were already evolved by the time the Pleistocene Glaciations (about two million years ago) covered much of the northern hemisphere and found it easy to spread out into much of Eurasia and North America as the ice age receded. It is also believed that these new habitats later attracted our cousin-ancestors, the Denisovans, who may have contributed to the later Homo sapiens of the Tibetan plateau better adapt to these tough conditions. The key point is that probably for the first time in the Earth’s history, specialized cold-adapted flora and fauna had evolved to occupy such inhospitable heights.

The Himalaya have different types of forests going up to the tree line, which is the general elevation where it gets too cold and windy for the trees to survive and only bushes, herbs, grasses, and ferns can survive to form stunning alpine meadows. The tree line fluctuates from around 3200 m in the western to about a 1000 m higher in the eastern Himalaya. The alpine meadows end around 5200 m across the Himalaya, where the permafrost and permanent snow cover begins, and higher than this most life ceases to exist. The mighty Himalayan range towers over 6000 m of ice and rock and yields to the cold deserts of the Tibetan Plateau and the vast steppes of Central Asia further north.

If we talk about mainly large mammals, there are some forest dwellers such as goral and serow, distant relatives of wild sheep and goats, and then others that are truly adapted to the cold and mostly dry high- altitude mountains and plateaus. The wild ungulates that evolved to use these expanses were mostly wild bovids that specialized in the narrow belt of high mountains between the tree line and the snow line and others that occupied the vast steppes of Tibet and Central Asia^1. The niche of all these species, as also their natural predators such as snow leopard and Tibetan wolf, is governed closely by the temperature, terrain, and the scarce, seasonal food available in these tracts.

Threats to Wildlife are Amplified by Climate Change

The wildlife here needs to contend with inter and intra species competition for the scarce resources, often exacerbated by large herds of livestock that arrive there to take advantage of the summer growth. Human density, although relatively low in most places, is now steadily increasing, causing pressures such as increasing need for fuelwood, fodder, medicinal plants and so on. The exquisite natural beauty, culture and adventure of the Himalaya attracts tourists to many sites. Free ranging dogs, increasing due to the garbage from increasing tourism facilities and human settlements, have taken over as the primary predator of both livestock and wildlife in many areas. With better access, even remote corners of the once pristine mountains have a large human imprint now^2. While such threats have reached unprecedented levels, the blight of climate change is adding more trouble for the native population of humans and animals alike. Extreme weather events are just one aspect that they must deal with, there are many others.

A noteworthy study by the World Wildlife Fund in 2012 showed that the tree line in the Himalaya is now creeping up into the meadows. While such vegetation succession can happen at a gradual pace, what will happen much faster is that now higher mountains and valleys will become more conducive for humans – they can live year round in hamlets at elevations where they earlier could only go during summer, they can now cultivate crops and orchards higher up, soon roads and electricity will be demanded and made, mobile networks will come, tourists will arrive and a narrow, but crucial strip of habitat will be unavailable for the alpine meadow species such as Himalayan tahr, monal pheasants and snow leopards. The increased presence of cultivation and livestock can cause disturbance and lead to greater conflicts that can further reduce the support to conservation. I mentioned about the enterprising farmers of Lahaul adapting to valuable cash crops such as apple and iceberg lettuce. With a lucrative market now, they are acquiring additional land around village periphery and even trying to occupy the remotest possible arable land away from habitations. The strong and intelligent brown bears, who have always been there, now have easy and delicious food available at their doorstep! Conflicts are rising in Lahaul and are a challenge to deal with.

Similarly, the Changpa nomads didn’t grow any crops till just a few decades ago as the crops would never mature in the very short summer season, but thanks to climate change, now they can get a good crop of barley and peas. The native Kiangs, the Tibetan wild ass, thus have ready, delicious ‘meals’ by raiding these crops! Conflicts are on the rise here too. There are other similar examples from across the region, that have increased conservation challenges.

One of the classic examples of catastrophic crash in wildlife populations related to climate change comes from a cold adapted species just north of the HKH region, from Kazakhstan. Here, large herds of the saiga antelope, occurred widely across the temperate steppes, but lost over 75% of their global population in just a month in 2015 to haemorrhagic septicaemia outbreak, which was linked to warming.

Often I have heard an assertion that glacial melt is creating ‘new habitats’ for wildlife. This is far from true. There is surely some rocky surface that gets exposed due to the retreat but imagine the time it will take for the pioneer plants to arrive, the soil creation to take place and a suitable vegetation succession to establish proper ‘pastures’ that can sustain an ecosystem? Possibly a millennium! We aren’t even creating climate models for that long. The fate of the permafrost also may not be too different as it will first become boggy and even unstable, causing loss of surface soils. No stable habitat will form here for a very long time for plants to establish.

Studies along the Himalaya have been consistent to suggest that climate change will primarily result in increasing disasters, water shortage and conservation challenges. While some opportunities may arise, such as better options for cash crops or improved access or living conditions for the local people, the net effect is likely to remain negative.

Most flora and fauna in the highest reaches of the Himalaya have specialized to these harsh conditions since the Pleistocene, but how resilient are they for the drastic changes in climate? Difficult to say, but the warming, increased aridity, unpredictable weather, loss of habitat, conflicts with people, increased risk of disease, may not portent well for the resilience.

The way ahead

The existing conservation threats of excessive biomass collection, livestock grazing, poaching and development need to be managed, ideally in an integrated and participatory manner, but in addition we need to know that these threats can worsen due to climate change. It is thus vital for development and conservation planners to device innovative ways to deal with this situation so that the native people and their natural heritage remain more secure. Knowledge-based climate adaptation is needed to ensure protection against disasters, and better water and food security of people. There are some successful experiments with water conservation, such as the use of artificial glaciers or ‘ice stupas’ for supplementing water for irrigation, promoting solar efficient housing that can save fuelwood in winter and limit damage to buildings from increased rain, move to remunerative organic cash crops and responsible tourism for more secure incomes, proactive people-wildlife conflict management to save their life and property, and conservation friendly development to ensure a good quality of life for both people and the other native denizens of the area.

Climate warming is a formidable challenge and calls for forging strong partnerships to ensure that over 240 million local people are protected from extreme weather events, there is food and water security for them and downstream communities, any conflicts with wildlife are effectively managed and conservation becomes a part of local people’s lives as well as in the mandates of other stakeholders. Our actions for conservation and climate mitigation can’t be limited to exclusionary wildlife protected areas, as most of the high Himalaya are a continuum of wildlife habitat and local people and other stakeholders are dependent on these almost pervasively. The question is how one can integrate all these innovations to work in synchrony? One course is provided by the ‘Project Snow Leopard’ (PSL).

PSL was launched by the Ministry of Environment Forest and Climate Change in 2009 to achieve conservation in vast landscapes of the Himalaya using participatory ideas and approaches, not exclusionary ones. A key need is to forge effective collaborations with all stakeholders, including local communities, government, armed forces, non-government agencies and certainly, an important stakeholder, the passionate mountain lover – mountaineers. The primary tool of PSL is to prepare knowledge-based integrated management plans for carefully identified conservation landscapes, not just protected areas. This provides an excellent opportunity for institutionalizing innovative climate-smart management that balances conservation and development. This is not an abstract thought but has already begun in all six Himalayan states/Union Territories, the best example being the Upper Spiti Landscape in Himachal Pradesh where such a plan is being implemented since 2011.

While we make all these attempts to save the fragile mountains, I sometimes wonder how the ibex is coping with the increased vagaries of Nature…the frequent flash floods in summers and avalanches in winter; unseasonal rains that soak their thin summer fur and make them vulnerable on the cold, windy ridges; of human settlements coming up in places that once used to be their safe spring pastures.

While countries work hard to reign in their carbon emissions and reduce the pace of climate warming, responsible on-ground work can make life easier for the ibex, other wildlife and of course the local people.

Summary

Yash Veer Bhatnagar underlines the impact of climate change on flora and fauna in the high Himalaya and also leaves food for thought on what is the way forward.

 

 

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