vanish in this valley alone – he points out their locations to me and I see only the same dry, sandy and pink rocks that fill the eye between valley and sky. Just the very top peaks are white, and the only glaciers I spot are at least 5,500 metres up. The warmer climate is not the villagers’ biggest concern, though. In fact, they rather like not having to be confined to their houses so early in the year. The most painful change is the new unpredictability in precipitation. A catastrophic pattern is developing for moisture at the wrong time of year.
This part of the Trans-Himalaya, after the Rohtang Pass, is in a precipitation shadow. It’s drier than the Sahara, with no rain for months on end. The westerly winds don’t reach here and the monsoon from the east doesn’t surmount the high pass. The snows used to arrive after October and build during the winter. Then, in March, the snowpack would begin melting, providing vital and timely irrigation for the sowing of the area’s barley crop. But the past decade has seen a gradual reduction in snowfall – the winters of 2012–13 were particularly dry, with serious consequences. Harvests are failing, drinking water is trucked in by government tanker, traditional self-sustained communities are breaking up as young people migrate to the cities or plains for work. Worse, when the precipitation does come, it arrives as rain during the harvest season, ruining what few crops the villagers have in the fields, before disappearing to lower elevations.
The changes have also reduced the sparse natural vegetation. Thupstan, another Stakmo farmer, tells me that he used to let his livestock roam the mountains eating wild grasses. Now, though, he has to give over some of his valuable planting fields to grow alfalfa for the yaks and goats. And wild creatures too are feeling the pinch. Last week, Thupstan found fifty ibex in his field eating his vegetables. The ibex attract wolves, which eat his goats. And the ibex and wild yaks are destroying his stone walls, knocking them over and blocking the irrigation channels with boulders.
Nearby, in Ladakh’s principal town of Leh, the rainfall is also causing problems. This is a region that had never experienced rain before the past decade. Houses are built from unfired mud bricks, and the roofs are sticks bound with mud and yak dung, with a hole to let the fire smoke escape. These homes are built for snow, which covers and insulates them in winter. The new rain is literally washing them away. The more wealthy people are starting to concrete their houses.
A little rain at the end of summer is no substitute for snowfall during winter. It is quickly drained away in the rivers and there is little replenishment of the groundwater. The springs in Leh have been dry for months now, as more and more people pump out the groundwater. Wells sit dry and unused. Some of this is the result of a booming tourism industry. New hotels and guest houses are fitted with flushing toilets, twenty-four-hour showers and washing machines. It is completely unsustainable. The guest house I stay in has a traditional Ladakhi composting toilet, but few others still do. My landlady nevertheless gets all the water we use from a hundred feet below ground with a generator-driven electric pump.
The explosion of tourism, and a ruinous government policy on subsidies, are partly to blame for the new water shortages, but much of the problem is down to climate change, owing to rising global greenhouse gas emissions and the regionally produced brown haze. Data are pretty much impossible to obtain – the military jealously guards all such information – but the locals are unanimous in their conclusion: the glaciers here are disappearing – and fast.
People here are especially vulnerable, because they have such a brief summer. If farmers don’t sow their single crop of barley, peas or wheat in March, it won’t have time to mature for harvesting in September before the harsh winter sets in, with temperatures that drop below -30°C. The problem is, the glaciers that remain are too high at above 5,000 metres, and don’t fill the irrigation channels until June – too late for the sowing season.
Meanwhile, demands on the region’s water sources are growing. In the Anthropocene humans are infiltrating the farthest reaches of the planet in large numbers. Even those places that once only supported a few families are now host to regular flights from rich cities, bringing swarms of temporary migrants and their lifestyle expectations. As in so many places in the developing world, tourism has brought new wealth and possibilities to the people of Leh, but without water, this fertile patch in a mountain desert will return to dust.
The Himalayas is the largest area covered by glaciers and permafrost outside of the polar regions, containing 35,000 square kilometres of glaciers and an ice reserve of 3,700 cubic kilometres. Glacial melting is accelerating every year, with current annual retreat rates of seventy metres for some glaciers. Mountains are changing dramatically and so fast that we can use recently produced Google Earth images to watch the white bits shrink. Melting rates have already exceeded those predicted by the international community of climate scientists (IPCC) – they expect 70% of the region’s glaciers to disappear the same way as Stakmo’s by the end of the century. Meltwater from small mountain glaciers alone already accounts for 40% of current global sea-level rise, and is predicted to add at least 12 centimetres to sea levels by 2100.4
As mountain glaciers shrink, lakes are created from the meltwater, hemmed in by the moraine of rocks and debris that are left by the retreating ice. As with dams caused by landslides, when glacial lake dams breach, the outburst of millions of tonnes of water can cause devastating flash floods. Satellite images have revealed around 9,000 glacial lakes in the region, of which more than 200 have been identified as potentially dangerous, capable of breaching in a so-called glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) at any time. Many only appeared during the past half-century, and have been growing steadily since. People have always lived in danger zones, such as the slopes of a volcano or the banks of a flooding river – often to exploit the richer soils – but the risk has been from an ‘act of God’, a natural event. In the Anthropocene, we are increasingly producing our own danger zones and imposing them on communities that have no traditional preparedness for such events. The Imja glacial lake in Nepal, for example, is now two kilometres long and nearly a hundred metres deep. When it bursts, the deluge of water could reach sixty kilometres away, swamping homes and fields with rubble up to fifteen metres thick, leading to the loss of the land for a generation. Hydrologists in Peru are now building tunnels to drain away an Andean glacial lake, after another ruptured its banks killing 10,000 people – tapping controlled outflows from these lakes could provide much-needed irrigation and hydropower for local populations.
Over the Holocene, glaciers around the world fluctuated with changes in temperature or precipitation, but in recent decades, glacier melt has increased rapidly and become global. In the Anthropocene, humans are steering natural processes and cycles. We have pushed the planet beyond its natural state and crippled its capacity to self-regulate or to bring back the glaciers we’ve melted. And as glaciers melt into lakes, overall loss of humanity’s precious water increases because water evaporates faster than ice. Snow and glacial melt in the Himalayas are the source of up to 50% of the water in ten of Asia’s major rivers, including the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Indus, Yellow, Mekong and Irrawaddy. These are the most populous river basins on Earth, with more than 1.3 billion people depending on them for everything from agriculture to fishing. In the Anthropocene, we will either have to discover ways to live without the fresh water that mountain glaciers store for us, or replace Earth’s largest fresh-water reserve with massive concrete reservoirs. The former option would certainly jeopardise the lives of millions of people, not to mention eroding wetlands and other ecosystems. The latter is urgent – globally glaciers have, on average, lost almost a quarter of their mass in the past sixty years. Around the world, reservoir-building is already under way by governments, albeit on a woefully inadequate scale. China is constructing fifty-nine reservoirs to catch and store meltwater from its declining glaciers in Xinjiang province, a high-altitude desert, but it is incredibly expensive and logistically impossible to replicate everywhere the vast acres of ice with concrete tubs of water. Ideally, reservoirs would be built underground to reduce evaporative loss, but that only makes them more expensive. Nevertheless, the Anthropocene will surely experience a vast programme of reservoir-building.
However, there is another option. I’ve come to Ladakh to meet a remarkable man, who
