{"id":2077,"date":"2018-08-24T11:28:21","date_gmt":"2018-08-24T05:58:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tibetnature.lhasocialwork.com\/en\/?p=2077"},"modified":"2018-08-24T12:13:53","modified_gmt":"2018-08-24T06:43:53","slug":"global-environmental-threat-made-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tibetnature.net\/en\/global-environmental-threat-made-china\/","title":{"rendered":"A Global Environmental Threat Made in China"},"content":{"rendered":"

Source<\/strong> : Project Syndicate<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Aug 23, 2018 by\u00a0BRAHMA CHELLANEY<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

From large-scale dam-building to unbridled resource-exploitation, human activity is causing serious damage to Himalayan ecosystems. While all the countries in the region are culpable to some extent, none is doing as much harm as China.<\/em><\/p>\n

NEW DELHI \u2013 Asia\u2019s future is inextricably tied to the Himalayas, the world\u2019s tallest mountain range and the source of the water-stressed continent\u2019s major river systems. Yet reckless national projects are straining the region\u2019s fragile ecosystems, resulting in a mounting security threat that extends beyond Asia.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

With elevations rising dramatically from less than 500 meters (1,640 feet) to over 8,000 meters, the Himalayas are home to ecosystems ranging from high-altitude alluvial grasslands and subtropical broadleaf forests to conifer forests and alpine meadows. Stretching from Myanmar to the Hindu-Kush watershed of Central Asia, the Himalayas play a central role in driving Asia\u2019s hydrological cycle and weather and climate patterns, including triggering the annual summer monsoons. Its\u00a018,000<\/a>\u00a0high-altitude glaciers store massive amounts of freshwater and serve in winter as the world\u2019s second-largest heat sink after Antarctica, thus helping to moderate the global climate. In summer, however, the Himalayas turn into a heat source that draws the monsoonal currents from the oceans into the Asian hinterland.<\/p>\n

The Himalayas are now subject to accelerated glacial thaw, climatic instability, and biodiversity loss. Five rivers originating on the Great Himalayan Massif \u2013 the Yangtze, the Indus, the Mekong, the Salween, and the Ganges \u2013 rank among the world\u2019s ten most\u00a0endangered<\/a>\u00a0rivers.<\/p>\n

From large-scale dam construction to the unbridled exploitation of natural resources, human activity is clearly to blame for these potentially devastating changes to the Himalayan ecosystems. While all the countries in the region are culpable to some extent, none is doing as much harm as China.<\/p>\n

Unconstrained by the kinds of grassroots activism seen in, say, democratic India, China has used massive, but often opaque, construction projects to bend nature to its will and trumpet its rise as a great power. This includes a globally unmatched inter-river and inter-basin water-transfer infrastructure with the\u00a0capacity<\/a>\u00a0to move over ten billion cubic meters (13 billion cubic yards) through 16,000 kilometers (9,940 miles) of canals.<\/p>\n

China\u2019s reengineering of natural river flows through damming \u2013 one-fifth of the country\u2019s rivers now have less water flowing through them each year than is diverted to reservoirs \u2013 has already degraded riparian ecosystems and caused 350 large lakes to\u00a0disappear<\/a>. With these water-diverting projects increasingly focused on international, rather than internal, rivers \u2013 in particular those in the Tibetan Plateau, which covers nearly three-quarters of the Himalayan glacier area \u2013 the environmental threat extends far beyond China\u2019s borders.<\/p>\n

And dams are just the beginning. The Tibetan Plateau is also the subject of Chinese geo-engineering experiments, which aim to induce rain in its arid north and northwest. (Rain in Tibet is concentrated in its Himalayan region.) Such activities threaten to suck moisture from other regions, potentially affecting Asia\u2019s monsoons. Ominously, such experiments are an\u00a0extension<\/a>\u00a0of the Chinese military\u2019s weather-modification program.<\/p>\n

Moreover, as if to substantiate the Chinese name for Tibet,\u00a0Xizang<\/a><\/em>(\u201cWestern Treasure Land\u201d), China is draining mineral resources from this ecologically fragile but resource-rich plateau, without regard for the consequences. Already, copper mine tailings are\u00a0polluting<\/a>\u00a0waters in a Himalayan region sacred to Tibetans, which they call\u00a0Pemako<\/em>\u00a0(\u201cHidden Lotus Land\u201d), where the world\u2019s highest-altitude major river, the Brahmaputra (Yarlung Tsangpo to Tibetans), curves around the Himalayas before entering India.<\/p>\n

Last fall, the once-pristine Siang \u2013 the Brahmaputra\u2019s main artery \u2013 suddenly turned blackish gray as it entered India, potentially because of China\u2019s upstream tunneling, mining, or damming\u00a0activity<\/a>. To be sure, the Chinese government\u00a0claimed<\/a>\u00a0that an earthquake that struck southeastern Tibet in mid-November \u201cmight have led to the turbidity\u201d in the river waters. But the water had become unfit for human consumption long before the quake.<\/p>\n

In any case, China is not letting up. It has, for example, eagerly launched large-scale\u00a0operations<\/a>\u00a0to mine precious minerals like gold and silver in a\u00a0disputed area<\/a>\u00a0of the eastern Himalayas that China claimed in 1959 and then seized from India in a 1962 armed clash.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, China\u2019s bottled-water industry \u2013 the world\u2019s\u00a0largest<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 is\u00a0siphoning<\/a>\u201cpremium drinking water\u201d from the Himalayas\u2019 already-stressed glaciers, particularly those in the eastern Himalayas, where accelerated melting of snow and ice fields is already\u00a0conspicuous<\/a><\/u>. Unsurprisingly, this is causing biodiversity loss and impairment of ecosystem services.<\/p>\n

Across the Himalayas, scientists report\u00a0large-scale deforestation<\/a>, high rates of loss of genetic variability, and species extinction in the highlands. The Tibetan Plateau, for its part, is warming at almost\u00a0three times<\/a>\u00a0the average global rate. This holds environmental implications that extend far beyond Asia.<\/p>\n

The towering Himalayan Highlands, particularly Tibet, influence the Northern Hemisphere\u2019s atmospheric-circulation system, which helps to transport warm air from the equator toward the poles, sustaining a variety of climate zones along the way. In other words, Himalayan ecosystem impairment will likely affect European and North American climatic patterns.<\/p>\n

Halting rampant environmental degradation in the Himalayas is now urgent, and it is possible only through cooperation among all members of the Himalayan basin community, from the lower Mekong River region and China to the countries of southern Asia. To bring about such cooperation, however, the entire international community will have to apply pressure to rein in China\u2019s reckless environmental impairment, which is by far the greatest source of risk.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Source : Project Syndicate Aug 23, 2018 by\u00a0BRAHMA CHELLANEY From large-scale dam-building to unbridled resource-exploitation, human activity is causing serious damage to Himalayan ecosystems. While all the countries in the region are culpable to some…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2078,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2077","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-highlights-articles","category-tibet-environment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tibetnature.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tibetnature.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tibetnature.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tibetnature.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tibetnature.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2077"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/tibetnature.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2077\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2087,"href":"https:\/\/tibetnature.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2077\/revisions\/2087"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tibetnature.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tibetnature.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tibetnature.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tibetnature.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}