South Asia at risk of water insecurity as global warming affects Himalayas

The impact of global warming in the Himalaya-Karakoram mountains threatens the life and livelihood of 1 billion people who partly depend on the Indus, Ganga, and Brahmaputra rivers. Melting snow and glaciers will make rivers swell, but the changing climate will affect farming, other livelihoods and hydropower sectors, while the cause of the flood is a new multinational company.

South Asia at risk of water insecurity

A new multinational study by researchers from Indore, Roorkee, Delhi, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, and Nepal has found., In India, the union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, the states of Himachal Pradesh and Punjab, and parts of northern Haryana and Rajasthan lie in the Indus basin.

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Uttarakhand, Delhi, the rest of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, and most of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh lies in the Ganges basin. Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh, as well as most of Assam, Meghalaya, and Nagaland, lie in the Brahmaputra basin. Affected people, especially in the larger cities of Delhi, Lahore, Karachi, Kolkata, and Dhaka, represent about 13% of the world's population in 2021, or one in eight people.

Base river runoff (water flowing into rivers) in the Himalayan-Karakoram (HK) region includes snowmelt, glacier melt, precipitation, and groundwater base flow, according to the study. Half of the ice in the Hong Kong region is contained in glaciers. The rate at which and when these glaciers melt affects the flow of river water in different seasons. Usually, rivers carry the snowmelt of the Hong Kong mountains in the summer, from April to June, and then the glacier melt until October, before the winter hardens the snow and ice again.

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Glaciers are melting

Another report said The way the temperature is increasing during the summer in Asia, it is also affecting the glaciers on the high mountains, and they are melting faster than before. This information has come to the fore in a study conducted by researchers from the University of St. Andrews. Surprisingly, even in the areas where glaciers were growing earlier, glaciers are melting now.

To understand this, researchers have used images from the US Corona spy satellite in the 1960s and the Hexagon spy satellite in the 1970s, as well as several modern satellites. Glaciologists have investigated various glaciers in the high mountain regions of Asia. It includes the Himalayas to several other major mountain ranges such as the Pamirs, the Tien Shan, and the mountains of Tibet.

According to the researchers, the behavior of glaciers makes it clear that climate change is clearly showing its effect in the high mountain areas. Significantly, these high mountain regions of glaciers are the source of some of the largest rivers in Asia, on which millions of people depend for their basic needs.

The findings of this research, published in the journal Nature Communications, show that in the future the ice may melt to a large extent in this region. Due to which these glaciers, which are reliable sources of water, will gradually disappear in the coming decades.

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