Woser's article on "Tibet's Water Pollution and China's 'Global Warming'" on HPPE

There is a really good Chinese language article on pollution of Lhasa River and problems associated with mining at Gyama village of Meldro Gungkar county by Woser, the premier Tibetan blogger. You can read an English translation of the article by High Peaks Pure Earth. Check out the striking photographic evidences of the problems with water pollution and mining in the region.

The Gyama mine is now owned by a Canadian company named Jinshan. I have written about human rights implications and Canada's involvement in these projects. See: Canada and Crime Against the Tibetan People

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Carbon emissions and the Tibetans

The prominent scientific journal, Nature, has an article about climate change and Tibet in its July 2008 issue, entitled The Third Pole. The article highlights the significance of ‘black carbon’ as a major heat-absorbing contributor of atmospheric warming: black carbon contributes about 50% of the solar heating of earth’s atmosphere and is the second largest (carbon dioxide being the first) cause of atmospheric warming over Tibet.

At first I was struck by the author's definition of black carbon as “the soot that results when people cook with bio-fuels such as wood, crop waste or dung.” Even more surprisingly, the author identifies Himalayas as a global hotspot for black-carbon emissions. When I told this to my advisor, he was skeptical considering the sparse population and low economic activity in Tibet. So I did some research. I read the two key studies that the author had cited in the paper. I found that her description of black carbon and Himalayan region’s contribution of the soot are inaccurate.

The author had only referred to one of the two categories of black-carbon sources. The original study, “Global and regional climate changes due to black carbon” by Ramanathan and Carcimichael had defined black carbon as comprising of two categories of sources: 1) in door sources such as the use of “biofuels like wood, dung and crop residue; and 2) outdoor sources such as fossil fuel combustion (dieseland coal), open biomass burning (associated with deforestation and crop residue burning), and cooking with biofuels” (R&C, p. 21).

So there are more than just bio-fuels that make up black-carbon. Still, how could the Himalayas, a sparsely populated area, be one of the global hotspots for black-carbon emissions? The region, even in the Southern face of the Himalayas in India, is not that densely populated, nor is it economically developed. Shimla, the capital city of the state of the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, may be one of the greatest contributors of black-carbon in the Indian Himalayas, but even Shimla cannot be that severe. As it turns out in Ramanathan and Carcimichael's study, the Himalayas is at the borderline between high and low black-carbon emitting regions. The Indo-Gangetic plains and the plains of “mainland China” are two of the major hotspots, not the Himalayas. The Tibetan plateau is clearly one of the lowest contributors of black-carbon, as shown in two simulated images of annual mean optical depth of black-carbon aerosols in the region (p. 225).

With these doubts clarified, I found two new (to me) noteworthy points:

1. Although CO2 and black carbon are the main contributors to atmospheric warming, water vapour actually has a even stronger greenhouse effect if measured per molecule. Water vapour is apparently not a big concern because it normally reaches no higher than 1–2 kilometres below the stratosphere, the layer of atmosphere which contains the most ozone. Research mentioned in the article says that climate warming (evaporation) and wind blowing over the plateau can transfer water vapour and pollutants (black carbon) into the stratosphere. If this is true, one can speculate that things could get pretty complicated and worrisome for the glaciers and snows on the the planet's Third Pole.

2. The article also touches on debates on the implications of the plateau's warming for the Monsoon. The obvious argument is that the increased (land) surface temperature would augment monsoon (higher temperature over land means more intense monsoon winds from the sea). However, some studies indicate that the plateau has had a weakening effect on the monsoon (see Fig. 4, R&C, p. 224). This is perhaps due to changes in land use patterns and aerosols that absorb solar radiation. So, it seems there is need for further studies before we can draw conclusions on this debate.

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"Climate Change as a Human Rights Issue for Subsistence-Based Societies"

Is it fair if the climate costs of development of industrialized economies such as US and China are borne by subsistence-based societies like those of Tibetans and the Inuits? Should the victims of climate change be compensated by its perpetrators? What if Tibetan nomads and pastoralists are being blamed and forcefully relocated for grassland degradation that is caused by global warming? Read an article by Professor Julia Klein of Colorado State University addressing some of these issues.




Climate Change as a Human Rights Issue for Subsistence-Based Societies
By Julia Klein
Source: ource: Trin-Gyi-Pho-Nya [སྤྲིན་གྱི་ཕོ་ཉ་], Tibet Justice Center, Vol. 2, No. 6, January 2005.

In December 2004, a meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change took place in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in anticipation of the upcoming entry into force of the Kyoto Protocol. At the same time, the Inuit -- 155,000 seal-hunting peoples scattered around the Arctic -- announced they were preparing a petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights stating that the United States, by contributing substantially to global warming, is threatening their existence. The Inuit people's lives and culture depend upon the Arctic ice. Scientists have concluded that climate change caused predominantly by human influences is causing that ice to melt and causing other impacts to the Inuit way of life. In their petition, the Inuit assert that because the United States is responsible for 25% or more of the greenhouse gas emissions that are contributing to climate change, the United States has an international obligation to prevent these human rights violations. The Inter-American Commission will forward the petition to the United States, which is the respondent, hold a series of hearings on the matter and determine whether this constitutes a violation of human rights.


[Photo by Raul Gutierrez]

Just as the Inuit rely on the arctic ice for their subsistence, Tibetan pastoralists depend on the alpine rangelands of the Tibetan Plateau for their survival. The pastoralists rely on the rangeland vegetation to convert the sun's energy into products - via domestic herbivores - that form the basis of their culture and subsistence. These products include food, clothing, housing, fuel, stored wealth, and transportation. The Tibetans also directly rely on vegetation for goods such as medicinal plants and other products.

Scientists, range managers and development personnell working on the Tibetan Plateau have primarily ignored issues of climate warming effects on the Tibetan rangelands. Rather, they have focused on the Tibetan rangelands with respect to grazing issues. The Tibetan rangeland debate is often couched in terms of whether the Tibetans are "rational" or "irrational" land managers, whether animal densities are increasing or decreasing on the Tibetan Plateau, the merits and drawbacks of fencing and sedentarization, and the effects of small mammal grazing on the rangelands. While most of these issues are very important, they should be studied in the context of a changing underlying climatic condition. These topics also highlight the propensity for scientists, range managers and development personnell working on the Tibetan Plateau to observe rangeland degradation, observe grazing animals (or fences or small mammals), and make a causal connection between the two based on observation rather than a valid scientific analysis of cause and effect.

While very little research has been conducted on how climate warming may affect ecosystem goods and services on the Tibetan Plateau, work has recently been published in the scientific literature (Klein et al. 2004) that shows climate warming could cause as much as a 36% decline in plant species diversity on the northeastern region of the Tibetan Plateau. This includes declines in medicinal plant species and palatable forage species richness. This work also indicates warming could reduce overall vegetative productivity and increase shrub encroachment in this region of the Tibetan Plateau (Klein 2003).

There is a consensus among the scientific community that much of the present climate warming on Earth is due to human activities (IPCC 2001). According to the New York Times, the United States was the only country at the climate meetings in Buenos Aires which continues to question the climate change science. There is also evidence that climate warming is occurring on the Tibetan Plateau (Thompson et al. 2000). China, which ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 1992, is the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases, but per capita emissions of global warming pollutants in China are just 15 percent of U.S. levels. China accepted no mandatory greenhouse gas emissions target under the Protocol -- only developed countries are subject to binding emission targets in the Kyoto Protocol's first emission control period, 2008 to 2012.

Climate warming is an unusual environmental problem because the primary actors driving the changes can be far removed from the most vulnerable recipients of the climate change effects. This large spatial disconnect between drivers and recipients is due to the nature of greenhouse gases, which mix relatively rapidly in the atmosphere across the globe. The Inuit people can assert their rights in the international arena because there has been careful documentation of climate change in the arctic, because the ecological and social impacts of climate change on the Inuit people have been rigorously studied for over a decade, and because supporters of the Inuit people recognize the links between politics, human rights and climate change. The Tibetan pastoralists, who are potentially highly vulnerable to climate change impacts, will also need to rely on rigorous science and an interested community to assert their rights to a resource base that is being affected by anthropogenic climate changes and to bring this issue to the attention of the international community.

References cited:
1. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2001. Climate change 2001: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (ed. Houghton, J.T., Griggs, D.J., Noguer, M., van der Linden, P.J., Dai, X., Maskell, K., & Johnson, C.A.). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
2. Klein, J.A., J. Harte & X.Q. Zhao. 2004. Experimental warming causes large and rapid species loss, dampened by simulated grazing, on the Tibetan Plateau. Ecology Letters 7(12) 1170-1179.
3. Klein, Julia A. 2003. Climate warming and pastoral land use change: implications for carbon cycling, biodiversity and rangeland quality on the Northeastern Tibetan Plateau, PhD Thesis, University of California, Berkeley.
4. Thompson L.G., Yao T., Mosley-Thompson E., Davis M.E., Henderson K.A. & Lin P.-N. (2000) A high-resolution millennial record of the South Asian monsoon from Himalayan ice cores. Science, 289, 1916-1919.

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