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ENVIRONMENT: World’s Water Towers Need Protection – Scientists

Sonny Inbaraj

BANGKOK, Nov 18 2004 (IPS) - Mountains are the world’s water towers and they need urgent protection if planet Earth’s future life-sustaining water supply is to be guaranteed, in the midst of disturbing climate changes, scientists told a major conservation conference Thursday.

”The greatest global value of mountain areas derives from the fact that almost all of the world’s major rivers rise from within them,” said Dr. Martin Price, director of the Britain- based Centre for Mountain Studies.

”They are the source of much of the world’s water supply – providing 80 to 100 percent of freshwater in arid and semi-arid regions of the world. To conserve this globally important function of mountains, they have to be protected and managed effectively,” added the scientist.

In winter water is stored as snow and when it melts in spring and summer, said Price, it becomes valuable water for people downstream that need it for agriculture, industry and domestic consumption.

But mountains are under threat themselves.

Projections by scientists show that Mount Kilimanjaro, on the border of Tanzania and Kenya, may well loose its icecap by 2020, whilst the Glacier National Park in northern United States will be without its ice fields by 2030 because of climate change.

”Climate change is accentuated in mountain environments,” Price told delegates at the World Conservation Congress organised by the World Conservation Union or IUCN. ”One of the worst examples are the glaciers of Kilimanjaro – it only took seven years for most of the glaciers to start melting.”

The IUCN global congress, from Nov. 17 to 25, in the Thai capital, is billed as the world’s largest conservation conference. It has brought together 81 states, 114 government agencies, 800 plus non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and some 10,000 scientists and experts from 181 countries.

Climate change is also one of the central themes of an IUCN manual for conservation managers launched at the global conference.

”In coming decades, climate change resulting primarily from human activities are likely to be more rapid than any experienced in the development of present mountain ecosystems, warned the ‘Guidelines for Planning and Managing Mountain Protected Areas’.

Global climate models, by scientists, project more pronounced climate change at high elevations, as well as high latitudes. And this according to Price will have a significant effect on plant and animal species.

”Climate change brings challenges – plants can move up mountains to higher altitudes if it gets warmer. But once they get to the top of the mountain where can they grow next?” he asked. ”Equally for an animal that lives in a mountain area – what does it do if its habitat disappears, or the snow melts at the wrong time of the year?”

On Wednesday, climbers and conservationists asked the United Nations to place Mount Everest in the Himalayas on a danger list because its snows are retreating rapidly as a result of climate change.

They also called on UNESCO, the Paris-based organisation responsible for the care of World Heritage sites, to designate the mountain and thereby place a legal duty on the world to protect the area.

The petitioners include the broadcaster Sir David Attenborough and the mountaineers Chris Bonington and Reinhold Messner, who was the first to climb the world’s 14 highest peaks.

The group warns that melt water is filling Himalayan lakes, which could cause catastrophic flooding if they burst.

Statements from some of Everest’s most distinguished climbers will be personally delivered to the World Heritage Committee in Paris this week by Pro Public (Friends of the Earth Nepal).

Pemba Dorjee Sherpa, who holds the record for the fastest climb of Everest – eight hours and 10 minutes said: ”Last year when Edmund Hillary came to Everest, he told me that so much snow had melted in the 50 years since he first climbed it.”

”1953 snow and ice had reached all the way to base camp, but now it ends five miles (eight kilometers) above. Everest is losing its natural beauty. If this continues, then tourists won’t come any more,” he told the ‘British BroadcastingCorporation’.

Nevertheless, according to IUCN, the global importance of mountains has been increasingly recognised in recent years. In 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, the Earth Summit included sustainable mountain development in its ‘Agenda 21’ plan of action.

In 1995, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) identified mountain ecosystems as the subject of one of its 10 operational programmes. By 2002, GEF had committed over 620 million U.S. dollars and leveraged about 1.4 billion dollars of additional funding for over 100 projects in 64 countries.

”Mountains are the world’s most sensitive ecosystems and yet support 12 percent of the Earth’s people, many of them in developing countries,” said David Sheppard, head of IUCN’s programme on protected areas.

”These areas are epicenters of biodiversity and for that reason almost a quarter of the world’s protected areas are in mountain regions,” he added.