1 of 1

Write now Article Tools

Due to global warming and environmental changes we are running out of water resources. As glaciers meltdown it will decline reserves of drinking water in the entire region, which will affect millions of human lives. Developing countries like Pakistan should chalk out effective strategies like constructing dams to meet their requirements

A research study has revealed that global warming has pushed up the temperature of the Himalayas, the roof of the world, by up to 0.6 degrees Celsius. It is predicted that Himalayan glaciers could disappear within 50 years as a consequence of climatic changes. It was apprehended in the report that it would result far-reaching implications for more than a billion people living in this part of the world. Surendra Shrestha, the Regional Director, United Nations Environment Programme for Asia and the Pacific, labelled it as 'extremely serious.'

Melting of the Himalayan glaciers is the reason for creating new lakes all over this mountain range, moreover reasoning to swell the existing ones, thus increasing the volume of water in rivers and triggering flash-flooding in the narrow underneath valleys. An already glacier-lake outburst in 1994, in the Lunana region of Bhutan caused to flood a number of villages, endangered the lives of thousands of people. Likewise in Nepal in 1997 the burst of the Dudh Koshi Lake reasoned similar consequences.

Himalayas range over six countries (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan) as well as extending into China and Myanmar. Thousands of glaciers in the Himalayas provides source to the nine largest and important rivers of the continent, whose basins are home to 1.3 billion people from Pakistan to Myanmar, together with parts of India and China. In fact, the Himalayas after Antarctica and Greenland, forms world's third largest mass of ice. Definitely this is Himalayan snow-glacier system, which forms the tallest water tower on the globe.

According to the experts, this trend will increase speed in the next half decade. It will produce catastrophic social and economic problems not only for the villages in the Himalayan foothills but also it would reason disaster for the entire South Asian region. Himalayan glacier lakes are filling up with more and more melted ice and in Bhutan, 24 of those lakes are now poised to burst their banks, a similar number of lakes are at peril in Nepal as well. According to the reports, it is just the beginning; future disasters in the region of the Himalayas

• 1
• 2
• 3
• next page >>

Add your voice

Know something about What can be done about the water crisis in the subcontinent ??
We want to hear your view. Write now!