Pema Gyamtsho – Nepal Live Today

Restoring mountain ecosystems

Pema Gyamtsho — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 06:52:15 +0000

Mountains are famously cradles of biodiversity –their steep slopes giving rise to a dizzying variety of life forms. They have grown increasingly crucial as refuges for nature: covering just one quarter of the planet, they hold 85 percent of Earth’s amphibians, birds, and mammals. This wealth of nature is reflected in the fact that of UNESCO’s 738 global biosphere reserves, significantly more than half are mountainous. 

Worryingly, however, these retreats for such an extraordinary abundance of nature –long protected from human interference by their remoteness or difficult terrain –are shrinking. Nature’s erstwhile cradles, and refuges, are now becoming graveyards. In the Hindu Kush Himalaya, 70 percent of biodiversity has vanished over the last century. These losses, including species extinctions, are now accelerating, as evidenced in ICIMOD’s major assessment report, Water, Ice, Society, and Ecosystems in the Hindu Kush Himalaya.

Recognition that nature is one of the biggest solutions to the crisis we now face growing –at the public, political, and diplomatic level. The United Nations declared 2021–2030 as the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration and last year, under the Kunming Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, more than 100 governments worldwide pledged to set aside 30 percent of land and sea for nature by 2030 –including all the countries of the HKH. And for the first time this year, nature was put at the centre of discussions at the United Nations global climate conference, COP28.

These efforts, and the ‘ecosystem restoration’ theme for this year’s International Mountain Day, provide an urgently needed impetus to revive and protect mountain landscapes. So how close are the eight countries of the Hindu Kush Himalayas to meeting the ‘30×30’ target? So far Bhutan is the only country to actually exceed the target, with 51.4 percent of its land area already under various protected area categories.

Nepal has just under 24 percent of its land under protection. China is just over halfway to the target, with 16 percent. Pakistan is at 12 percent; India at 8 percent; Myanmar at 7 percent; Bangladesh at 5 percent, and Afghanistan at 4 percent.

Worryingly, across the Hindu Kush Himalaya, critical spaces where nature is still abundant remain outside protection: 67 percent of ecoregions, 39 percent of biodiversity hotspots, 69 percent of key biodiversity areas and 76 percent of important bird and biodiversity areas all remain unprotected.

Those protected areas that do exist are ‘islands’ in a sea of human modified landscapes, lacking corridor connectivity with other protected sites, insufficient for wide ranging species, and under pressure from poaching, encroachment, and extraction. Existing protected areas are insufficient to ensure the successful conservation of our region’s flagship species including the Asian elephant, the one-horned rhinoceros, and the Royal Bengal Tiger.

One solution, not yet attempted, would be to establish transboundary biosphere reserves, which would allow for conservation at landscape scale. This would take a shared political commitment across nation state boundaries to cooperate on the management of a shared ecosystem. It is a solution ICIMOD will encourage our regional member countries to embrace.

The bottom line, however, is that to reverse nature’s loss we must value and fund it. As long as economists continue to place its value at zero, it will not be considered. Until it is valued, countries with vast natural capital but less developed economies will lack the Triple A Credit Rating required to borrow at lower rates of lending. Cheaper capital to restore nature must be made available for the countries in this region: and this is something ICIMOD will work with our members, multilateral development banks and others to urgently advance. Because it has never been more evident that to prevent Earth systems from completely collapsing, we must give nature a home.

Pema Gyamtsho is Director General at International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD).

Opinion | Early warning for all cannot come soon enough for the Hindu Kush Himalaya

Pema Gyamtsho — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 11:16:00 +0000

The economic price of climate-driven storms, floods, heatwaves and droughts has been calculated for the first time—and found to have already, over the course of the last two decades, cost humanity, collectively, $16m an hour. Two-thirds of the costs were due to loss of life. The rest, to property and other assets.

These are not mere statistics to the Hindu Kush Himalaya. Already, across our region this year, families have borne unbearable losses due to climate disasters. Hundreds of lives have been lost. Many more have been turned upside down as homes, crops, possessions have been lost in devastating floods and landslides. Most recently, last week’s flood of the Teesta River in Sikkim caused by a glacial lake outburst served as a stark reminder that nature’s fury knows no bounds.

This year’s International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction falls as families, scientists and policymakers across our region take stock of the heavy human and economic costs of this monsoon and rising global temperatures.

They will also be looking forward. Because climate-driven disasters are set to soar. The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction anticipates we’ll see 560 disasters annually by 2030, pushing an additional 37.6 million people into extreme poverty.

The science shows that our region is a hotspot for risks. Not only those associated with extreme rain and cryosphere change—but also heatwaves, droughts, and toxic air. So, while we count the costs of events this monsoon, the onus is on all of us that serve this region and its people to move with greater speed and ambition to join the dots between science, policy and action, and to make good on the ambition to make early warning for all a reality for those communities exposed.

We badly need donors to recognize the extent of our exposure to risk in this region: both in terms of numbers and scale of hazards, but also in terms of the population size impacted. We urgently need the Adaptation Fund, the Green Climate Fund and the Children’s Investment Finance Fund to release funds ever faster to this region; and for compensation mechanisms to be operationalized.

At ICIMOD we will be advocating for both globally. We will also be working across the region to build out a culture of data-sharing around disaster preparedness and response; to educate policymakers of gaps and key areas for action; to equip communities with innovative and accessible technologies and to scale out community-based flood early warning systems.

Our region shows the huge inequality there is in terms of exposure to hazards worldwide. Our research tells us too that women and vulnerable groups are disproportionately affected when a crisis hits. We pledge to fight this inequality by mobilizing the tools, knowledge and funds to ensure people in this region are resilient to future shocks, placing women and vulnerable group at the heart of our strategies. Early warning for all cannot come fast enough for the countries of the Hindu Kush Himalaya.

Pema Gyamtsho is Director General at International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD).

Ensure clean air for blue skies: Urgent call for global convention on air pollution

Pema Gyamtsho — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 02:31:00 +0000

“Air pollution is the greatest external threat to human life expectancy on the planet” reads a headline from the recent Air Quality Life Index (AQLI) report. This stark warning should be enough to galvanise global action to tackle this most serious and ever-present threat. Yet there is currently no global cooperation framework or convention dedicated to tackling this “silent killer”.

According to WHO, 7 million premature deaths annually are associated with air pollution – that’s more than the number of people who have died from Covid-19 to date, and according to the AQLI report, air pollution is more dangerous to the health of the average person than smoking or alcohol. To mark this year’s International Day of Clean Air for Blue Skies, I urgently call on global and regional leaders to set up a global cooperation framework to combat air pollution. This framework should be in line with those that address the other two elements of the ‘triple planetary crisis’ – climate change and biodiversity loss.

The Hindu Kush Himalaya region is acutely affected by air pollution from a number of sources, including motorized vehicles, a range of industries, and the burning of solid biofuels, crop residues and household waste. Importantly, this polluted air is not particular to one city, region or country but shared throughout the whole Indo-Gangetic Plain and the Himalayan Foothills – an area spanning hundreds of thousands of km2 across the north Indian subcontinent and mountains. Particulate matter in this region often exceeds safe levels, affecting approximately one billion people who live here.

As the UN air pollution campaigns explain, particulate matter are tiny particles of pollution that penetrate deep into our lungs, bloodstream and organs. These pollutants are responsible for about one-third of deaths from stroke, chronic respiratory disease, and lung cancer, as well as one quarter of deaths from heart attack. Ground-level ozone, produced from the interaction of many different pollutants in sunlight, is also a cause of asthma and chronic respiratory illnesses.

“In Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan, residents are expected to lose about 5 years of life expectancy on average, if levels of pollution persist,” reveals the AQLI report, published by the Energy Policy Institute of the University of Chicago, USA.

Added to this gravity, the report continues, “Asia and Africa bear the greatest burden yet lack key infrastructure”. Despite this, there are reasons for hope of possible solutions in our region, as China’s efforts to curb pollution remain a remarkable success—and a work in progress. As the AQLI report states, “China’s pollution has declined 42.3 percent since 2013, the year before the country began a “war against pollution.” Due to these improvements, the average Chinese citizen can expect to live 2.2 years longer, provided the reductions are sustained.”

Air pollution has long been on ICIMOD’s radar, and we have dedicated time and expertise to detailed monitoring of the region’s air quality. This includes the ‘characterization’ of air pollution – which means determining what pollutants it is made up of, why, and where, which people and ecosystems are affected by the different types, and how. This point links to a recent publication in the journal Lancet, which compared the global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories for the years 1990–2019. This study pointed out that, while efforts to combat indoor air pollution have had some impact on reducing the risks globally compared to 1990 levels, risks associated with outdoor ambient air quality have increased substantially by 2019. Today, globally, ambient PM carries a higher burden of risk than indoor air pollution, according to this Lancet publication. In this respect, we must focus our attention to ambient particulate pollution while continuing to reduce indoor air pollution.

In ICIMOD’s new Strategy 2030 entitled ‘Moving Mountains’ we have prioritized clean air as one of four long-term impact areas, and we have worked to sensitize our partners on the importance of accurate data, with which to develop sustainable solutions.

We have a dedicated Action Area to work with our partners to tackle the challenges around poor air quality through knowledge co-generation and exchange. Our work also looks at the link between air pollution and climate change. Along with warming from greenhouse gases, air pollution, such as black carbon and dust, traps excess heat causing the climate to warm, and accelerates the melting of glaciers.

This poses a major threat to people in this region – as melting glaciers can have serious impacts on the lives and livelihoods of 240 million people in the mountain communities and 1.65 billion more living downstream. As the UN states, “improving air quality can enhance climate change mitigation and climate change mitigation efforts can improve air quality.”

Air pollution being a regional problem, many studies and reports have presented the case for achieving enhanced air pollution reduction when working together in a harmonized way compared to tackling the problem in silos or in an ad-hoc manner. Together with our partners and funders, in 2022 we brought together representatives from some of our regional member countries to start the dialogue in thinking about air pollution from a regional perspective. The outcome of that meeting was the ‘Kathmandu Roadmap’, which outlined a possible process for enhanced regional collaboration.

As stated here, air pollution is the single greatest environmental risk to human health and one of the main avoidable causes of death and disease globally. It is crucial that we all now “come together for clean air”. I reiterate my call to set up a global cooperation framework to combat air pollution. Join us, to reduce the number of deaths and illnesses from hazardous chemicals and air pollution by 2030.

Pema Gyamtsho is Director General at International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD).

Building back biodiversity in the Hindu Kush Himalaya

Pema Gyamtsho — Tue, 23 May 2023 08:11:05 +0000

Our region—the Hindu Kush Himalaya—has been hit hard by the perfect storm of the triple planetary crises of climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss. Against this backdrop, this year’s theme for the International Day of Biological Diversity– From agreement to action: Build back biodiversity – brings a renewed sense of hope while also underscoring the urgency of implementation. The hope comes from the adoption of the historic Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, with all parties committed to setting national targets to implement it, putting us on an ambitious pathway to achieve the shared vison of a world living in harmony with nature by 2050.

Our recent review showed that 50 percent of globally threatened species are in decline and the status of 25 percent is unknown. We need to step up our engagement and support transformative action at scale and with urgency if we are to reverse the biodiversity loss that we have witnessed over the past few decades. We have prioritized restoration and regeneration in our Strategy 2030, which will guide our programming and partnerships in the regional member countries (RMCs) over this decade.

Timely preparation and implementation of National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plans (NBSAPs) by the RMCs is key for halting and reversing the trend of biodiversity loss in the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH). NBSAPs are designed to integrate conservation and sustainable use into national decision-making and mainstream issues across sectoral plans and the policy-making framework. Countries should also explore complementarities in their approaches, especially in transboundary landscapes and river basins, where biodiversity conservation challenges are not confined within national boundaries. In the HKH, regional mechanisms such as the HKH Call to Action, agreed upon by the eight countries, provide an excellent platform for achieving harmonized biodiversity conservation approaches at the regional scale that mainstream biodiversity conservation and poverty reduction in the region.

It is also time to step back and revisit the Programme of Work on Mountain Biodiversity (PoWMB) and renew the call for its prioritization in the NBSAPs. The PoWMB aims at contributing to poverty alleviation in mountain ecosystems and in lowlands dependent on the goods and services of mountain ecosystems. This is particularly critical in our context, given that the HKH supports the food, energy, and water security of some 1.6 billion people downstream.

The Framework is also an important step forward for social and environmental justice. A significant proportion of the world’s remaining biodiversity is conserved by Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IPLCs) through their customary practices and institutions outside of the formal protected area network. The Framework calls on countries to acknowledge and recognize the rights and practices of IPLCs, their customary institutions and systems, and their effective and equitable participation in decision-making and benefit sharing. In doing so, it seeks to address the historical injustices in area-based conservation.

Lastly, the Framework highlights the importance of Nature-based Solutions (NbS) and ecosystem-based approaches in reversing biodiversity loss, maintaining and enhancing nature’s contributions to people, and improving climate resilience. Through our various interventions, we are looking at NbS to address key societal challenges around water, food, disaster and livelihoods. For instance, we are addressing the decline in diversity of food systems through the revival and integration of traditional crops and livestock, and highlighting the role that neglected and underutilized species can play as ‘future smart’ foods. Our springshed work underlines the importance of sustainable and nature-centered water management for biodiversity conservation. Similarly, our work on bioprospecting-based livelihoods emphasizes economic incentives and equitable benefit sharing for mountain communities engaged in biodiversity conservation.

We have a historic agreement. It is time for action. We need greater investment in biodiversity actions in the HKH. As the IPBES-IPCC workshop on Biodiversity and Climate Change highlighted, investments in biodiversity actions can have significant climate and other co-benefits. As an observer to the Convention on Biological Diversity, with a mandate for biodiversity conservation in the HKH, we are committed to working with our member countries in meeting the targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

Let’s act together on this International Day of Biological Diversity.

Pema Gyamtsho is Director General at International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD).

Earth Day 2023: Critical call to ‘invest in our planet’ as pollution envelops Hindu Kush Himalaya

Pema Gyamtsho — Sat, 22 Apr 2023 05:54:56 +0000

As the Nepali New Year dawned, the sun’s rays shone weakly through the dense Kathmandu haze, and the city was shrouded in smog. Air quality in Nepal’s capital, along with Delhi, Dhaka, Lahore and other cities in Asia, often exceeds safe levels. Particulate matter in Kathmandu in the past week were recorded at 10 times higher than World Health Organization’s guidelines. Today, 22 April, is Earth Day—an annual event to demonstrate environmental protection, and a fitting reminder for the whole of the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) to come together to take urgent action on air pollution.

This year’s Earth Day theme is ‘Invest in Our Planet’, a timely call for all—governments, businesses and individuals—to pledge money, time, resources and expertise to mitigate the effects of the climate crisis. This includes air pollution, which also significantly impacts human and environmental health. According to WHO, on a global scale the combined effects of ambient air pollution and household air pollution are associated with 7 million premature deaths annually—that’s more than the number of people who have died from Covid-19 to date. In the HKH especially, poor air quality impacts the entire region, as the geo-climatic conditions can transport pollution such as black carbon over long distances. This means emissions from vehicles in a crowded city might impact farmers in remote parts of a neighboring country, or smoke from crop residues burnt after harvest or from forest fires is shared in urban centers across national boundaries.

Air pollution also affects the cryosphere—frozen water at the earth’s surface which includes glacier ice, snow, permafrost, and lake, river and sea ice. This is one of ICIMOD’s key areas of study, as the status of the cryosphere has major impacts on the lives and livelihoods of 240 million people in the mountain communities and 1.65 billion more living downstream. We have developed transformative strategies for managing cryosphere hazards such as glacial lake outburst floods, landslides, rockfalls, and ice and snow avalanches. Along with warming from greenhouse gases, air pollution, such as black carbon and dust traps excess heat causing the climate to warm, and accelerates the melting of glaciers.

This demonstrates once more how the HKH is bearing the brunt of climate change. As indicated in the ICIMOD-led comprehensive assessment of the HKH region, if global warming exceeds 2°C, it will result in losing 50 percent of the glaciers in the region, destabilize river systems in Asia, and affect billions of people living downstream. This will lead to irreversible damage to the ecosystem, loss of biodiversity, and loss of watershed function, causing food and water insecurity. Even a 1.5°C rise in temperature is unsuitable for the region due to elevation-dependent warming, which increases the risk of extreme weather events, flash floods, changes in agriculture, and long-term instability.

Here at ICIMOD, we have carried out targeted research on the causes, factors and impacts of air pollution in the HKH, with a wide body of published scientific knowledge. It is imperative that we now collaborate with partners, funders, ICIMOD colleagues past and present, and with our eight regional member countries—Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal, and Pakistan—to devise urgent and lasting solutions to our plummeting air quality.

In concrete terms, and inspired by this year’s Earth Day theme, I encourage our community to invest in our planet. Actions that we can all do as individuals include: not burning rubbish, minimizing use of motorized vehicles where possible and taking care not to start forest fires, for example with lit cigarette butts, matches or leaving broken glass in forests or fields.

At the governmental/institutional level, we recommend:

Implementing a mass awareness campaign on the effects of poor air quality on our health and environment, and the actions everyone can do to minimize air pollution. As a first step for younger readers, check out the books The World of Smoke and Chanchle’s Journey, publicly available on our database HimalDoc.
Collaborating with policymakers across the eight HKH countries to develop, reform, implement and maintain policies that directly minimize emissions.
Engaging with our investment framework ‘Mountains of Opportunity Investment Framework’ to stimulate action for clean air.
Strengthening capacity at national and regional levels to address environmental and climate change issues including air pollution, adapting to climate change and building resilience in the HKH.

Here at the top of the world, changes happen before they happen anywhere else. In line with our new Strategy—Moving Mountains—we aim to harness this moment of great change to carry out evidence-based action through ambitious partnerships that address the region’s needs. As the HKH’s knowledge sharing center, it is our duty to provide up-to-date information, research and recommendations on how to stop our region choking from toxic air. As an intergovernmental organization, we must act as convener and mediator to make this happen. We invite everyone to join in our mission to transition towards a greener, more inclusive, and climate-resilient HKH.

Pema Gyamtsho is Director General at International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD).