Thin ice

While addressing the Sagarmatha Sam-baad, a biennial global summit asses-sing the impact of climate change on mountains, in Kathmandu recently, India's Union minister of environment, forest and climate change, Bhupender Yadav, sounded the alarm about the growing ecological vulnerability of the Himalayas.

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The susceptibility of the 'third pole' - the Himalayas are so named owing to their deposits of snow and ice that are the largest after the Arctic and the Antarctic - to the debilitating impacts of global warming is not new information. As early as 2010, the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development in Kathmandu had flagged the fragility of the Hindu Kush-Karakoram-Himalayan ecosystem. Further, the first climate change assessment report published by India's ministry of earth sciences in 2020 stated that the HKH, which spans eight countries, had warmed by about 1.3 degrees Celsius between 1951 and 2014. The retreat of the Himalayan glaciers triggered by temperature rise, a