Why climate change in Tibet is a global issue
As I boarded my flight to join the Tibetan delegation at Copenhagen for the climate change summit, a British police officer stopped me to ask about the purpose of my visit. If I was going to COP15, he said, did I plan to participate in any violent demonstrations? There may have been little obvious logic in this line of enquiry, but it was an immediate indication of the security concerns that have surrounded this gathering of world leaders and civil society for talks that have been described as the most important in the history of humanity.
I was there to join the first group of Tibetans ever to be present at a global climate change forum. Tibetans from the Tibetan exile government, NGOs and from inside Tibet were part of an international team called Tibet Third Pole under the auspices of the International Tibet Support Network.
Tibet, the world’s largest and highest plateau, is the “world’s third pole” because it contains the biggest ice fields outside of the Arctic and Antarctic. As the source of most of Asia’s rivers, including the Yangtze and the Brahmaputra, Tibet serves as a lifeline for hundreds of millions of people, and it plays an essential role in the intricate process that creates monsoon rains across Asia
This underlines why we should all be concerned by a startling fact about which few are aware: Tibet’s climate is warming twice as fast as the world’s. The impact of the current melting of Tibet’s glaciers is likely to be catastrophic. The Tibetan team at Copenhagen had an important message – limiting the speed of this change is everyone’s responsibility. Tibet’s climate is a global issue.
There is much work to do to ensure this important message reaches climate change negotiators, governments, and the international media. At COP15, the Tibet Third Pole team held media briefings (you can view one here), spoke to country representatives, developed alliances with other NGOs. We now need to build on this important work of getting the concept of Tibet Third Pole on the radar internationally. Our intention was to show how what happens in Tibet matters to everyone, not only to Tibetans, and to point to solutions.
At the Klima Forum where NGOs gathered, away from the Bella Center, where the main conference is being held Lama Lobsang, a Tibetan who now lives in London, gave a powerful account of the impact of climate change and environmental degradation on his home area in Tibet. He told a packed audience that some of his best childhood memories were of going to swim in a beautiful lake near his house. When he asked his nephew on the phone this summer whether he’d been swimming, his nephew told him that the lake had dried up. It is part of a pattern of desertification across Tibet’s fragile landscape.
Tenzin Norbu, who heads the Environment and Development Desk of the Tibetan government in exile in Dharamsala, explained how climate change in Tibet is linked to Chinese land use policies. Tibet’s high altitude, rugged terrain and harsh climate resulted in the creation of sustainable systems of traditional agricultural and livestock rearing, which meant that until now, Tibet’s landscape and ecosystem has remained relatively intact. But China’s policies of fast-track development based on an urban industrial model are damaging the fragile high-altitude ecosystem, threatening to severely alter the natural hydrological regime of the plateau, and depriving Tibetans of the stewardship of their land at a time of environmental crisis.
Scientists have warned that increased urbanization and infrastructural development (such as the Qinghai-Tibet railway that runs across shifting permafrost of the plateau) may be contributing to the adverse effects of global warming.
The Chinese government has also been implementing policies of settling Tibetan nomads, confiscating their land, and fencing pastoral areas. These policies result in nomads losing their livelihoods and living in isolated encampments, and are intensifying poverty and leading to social and cultural breakdown of communities (http://www.savetibet.org/documents/reports/tracking-steel-dragon). Tash Despa, who traveled back to Tibet from exile for the film Undercover in Tibet, gave a vivid account in Copenhagen of his clandestine visit to one of these remote encampments where nomads were settled without any choice.
But the point of talking about the displacement of nomads in Copenhagen is that these policies are not only jeoapardising the survival of one of the world’s last systems of sustainable pastoralism. It is because they are also detrimental to Tibet’s fragile ecosystem. Scientific evidence shows that they are threatening the survival of the rangelands and Tibet’s biodiversity. The policies run counter to the latest scientific evidence of mitigating grasslands degradation, which points to the need for livestock mobility in ensuring the health of the rangelands. Recent research also suggests that grazing can mitigate the negative warming effects on rangeland abundance and resilience.
And there is an increasing consensus among Chinese, Tibetan and Western scholars that the traditional ecosystem knowledge of nomadic pastoralists protects the land and livelihoods and helps restore areas already degraded.
That’s why an important part of our work at Copenhagen was to communicate that the involvement of Tibetans and nomads in particular – is essential to sustaining the long-term health of the ecosystems and water resources that China depends upon.
Just as China is essential to successful implementation of global climate-change solutions, Tibet is indispensable to China’s ability to implement them successfully. As the Dalai Lama has consistently said, the co-operation of stakeholders from Tibetan nomads to Chinese scientists and representatives of the nations downstream that depend on Tibet’s water is crucial.
Tibet needs serious attention in global talks on climate change and China’s strategy to address climate change needs to include the Tibetan people. It is essential that the work we began at Copenhagen must continue, after the world leaders depart, and after the ice bear in the center of the city created as a symbol of the crisis facing the glacial poles melts to leave only a bronze skeleton.
Photo Caption: The Chinese government has been implementing policies of settling Tibetan nomads, confiscating their land, and fencing pastoral areas. The involvement of Tibetan nomads is essential to sustaining the long-term health of the ecosystems and water resources that China depends upon. (ICT)
5 Responses to “Why climate change in Tibet is a global issue”
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The effects of Global Warming is getting much stronger these days. We should concentrate more on alternative energy to reduce carbon emissions.
Global Warming and Climate Change is the biggest environmental issue that we face these days. the long term effects of these environmental changes to a nations economy is quite damaging. there would be a shortage in food supply as well as on water supply too.
Geachte Lezer
Ik heb deze brief/e-mail gelezen,en ik vind het fijn dat jullie proberen de mensheid te overtuigen van het belang van beschermen van
de verhitting van onze globe/wereld
Vriendelijke groeten
Søren Nielsen
Perhaps Tibet should be prized as an autonomous zone as an ecological buffer as well as a political buffer between China and India whithout massive moderniation and development that is not condusive to a sustainable ecological and cultural future.
This article is pure evidence that all of humanity needs to cast their differences aside and work together to solve the problems before us. It is the only approach to crises that can work and it will create planet-wide unity. Eventually there will be no China, no Tibet, no United States. There will be the new Planet Earth in its pristine state.