For the last two climbing seasons, Dawa Sherpa has missed scaling the summit of Mt Everest. But the climate ambassador for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and two-time Everest summiteer may not be relishing the thought of bearing witness once more to the impact of rising temperatures on the world’s highest peak.

The Tso Rolpa glacial lake in central Nepal has grown due to the faster melting of snow with global warming. Credit: Kishor Rimal/IPS

Indeed, he says that even making one’s way just up to Base Camp, which lies at an altitude of 5,380 metres, can already give one the dismal view of the devastation climate change is wreaking.

“Snow cover in the mountains is decreasing, crevasses are opening up in the glaciers,” says Dawa. “Avalanches (have been) occurring frequently (in) the past two years.”

In 2010, one of his Sherpa staff lost his life to an avalanche. Dawa also recalls Appa Sherpa, the 20-time Everest summiteer who has been climbing Everest since 1990, as saying last year that he has seen small puddles of water even at an altitude of 8,000 metres.

Snow and glaciers cover about 10 percent of the area of Nepal, where about 10 percent of the stream flows can be traced back to the glaciers.

Melting glaciers and receding snowlines, however, are just among the many manifestations of climate change in this tiny Himalayan nation.

Ministry of Forests and Soil Conservation Joint Secretary Dr Jagadish Chandra Baral shares with IPS a striking example of how climate change has been affecting Nepal’s horticulture sector.

“The apple-growing belt in the Mustang district is gradually shifting to higher altitudes,” says Baral, who writes frequently on climate change, because warming temperatures have resulted in their fruits getting worms. “People there claim that while they could easily produce healthy apples as low as Lete (2,480 metres) until a few years ago, the apples now tend to catch worms even in higher altitudes like Larjung (2,550 metres), Kobang (2,640 metres) and Marpha (2,670 metres).”

Mustang is located near the Tibet border. Recently, a village there was dubbed as Nepal’s first ‘climate refugee village’.

Efforts are now underway to resettle the entire village of Dhe to a lower area of Mustang. Among other things, the sources of water there are drying up, while the flora in and around the area have been vanishing fast, leaving the villagers’ cattle herds and other grazing animals with little to eat.

According to the English-language national daily ‘Republica’, which broke the news about Dhe in June, “(a) total of 150 people (23 households) …are being shifted due to the adverse impact of climate change on the livelihoods of the poor in the village”.

“Dhe village has been facing an acute shortage of water for irrigation over the last six to seven years,” it added. “The irrigated land over the period has also been reduced to less than 50 percent and animal husbandry (particularly goat keeping) has declined by 40 to 45 percent.

The irony is that Nepal itself is said to contribute next to nothing to climate change, which is traced by experts to greenhouse gas emissions of countries around the world.

China and India, which sandwich Nepal, in fact happen to be two of the world’s fastest industrialising and highest carbon dioxide-emitting countries.

Earlier in 2010, though, those who have expressed doubt that climate change is real had a field day when the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced it had made a mistake in saying the Himalayan glaciers may be gone by 2035. The climate-change sceptics took this as yet another piece of evidence that much of what had been said of the global phenomenon had been nothing but hysterical hype.

But IPCC has clarified that while it had made an error on the date, it did not make a mistake about the melting away of the Himalayan glaciers.

Madan Shrestha of the Nepal Academy of Science and Technology also remarks, “We have ample scientific evidence to prove that climate change is causing the Himalayan glaciers to retreat.”

Shrestha has been studying Nepal’s glaciers since 1974, when he was a part of the Glaciological Expedition to Nepal (a joint effort of Japan and Nepal).

He says that he was shocked beyond belief to see a picture taken in October 2009 of the Yala glacier (5,100 metres to 5,700 metres) in Lamtang area in central Nepal. Comments Shrestha: “The photograph was evidence of the fact that the glacier’s mass had decreased and there was a significant terminus retreat.”

A comparative analysis of photographs taken during different time periods clearly reveals that the fate of other glaciers such as AX010 (4,950 metres to 5,390 metres) glacier in Shorong mountain in East Nepal is no different, he adds.

Shrestha says, though, that since Nepal’s contribution to global climate change is minimal, there is not much it needs to do in terms of mitigation. “As a token response to international efforts we should voice our willingness to be a part of mitigation efforts,” he says, “but our focus has to be on adaptation”.

By that, he means introducing heat-resistant crop varieties and working to strengthen the dam structures so that they can withstand increased water pressure, among other thing. He says that Nepal can take a cue from Bangladesh, which has already introduced a flood-resistant variety of rice.

“It is high time we factored in climate change in our development discourse,” says Shrestha. “This has simply been not happening.”

*This IPS story is part of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network http://www.cdkn.org

The climate of fear that has been growing in this Himalayan country since the murder of two media entrepreneurs and other attacks on journalists may well push them to turn to more self-censorship.

Journalists protest violence against media in Kathmandu. Credit: Keshav Thoker/IPS

While many are used to violence never being too far away from their work, especially at the height of the 10-year Maoist insurgency, what worries journalists is the fact the culprits behind these attacks are almost always never apprehended.

Already, fear has driven the staff of ‘Janakpur Today’ newspaper, the chairman of whose publishing group was killed by unidentified gunmen on Mar. 1, to finish work as early as they can and leave the office by 6 p.m. before nightfall, says Ajit Tiwari, a journalist who reports from the eastern plains of Nepal.

The killing of the two media entrepreneurs took place less than a month from each other.

Jamim Shah, managing director of SpaceTime Network that airs Channel Nepal, a satellite TV channel, was shot dead in broad daylight on Feb. 7 here in the capital Kathmandu. Arun Singhaniya, chairman of the Today Group that publishes the popular daily ‘Janakpur Today’, was killed by unidentified gunmen in Janakpur, located 135 kilometres south-east of Kathmandu, on Mar.1.

Singhaniya’s murder was followed by a death threat against ‘Janakpur Today’ editor, Brij Kumar Yadav, the next day. On Mar. 3, another journalist, Bivek Bhattarai, was attacked with sharp weapons in Pathari of Morang district in eastern Nepal.

The chairman and editors of Kantipur publications, which publishes the largest-selling national daily ‘Kantipur’, and the English-language daily ‘The Kathmandu Post’, also received threats from unidentified groups to stop their coverage of Shah’s killing.

“Considering the law and order situation, it would be foolish to deny that Nepalese media was free of self-censorship. However, the recent high-profile murders will further impact the work of journalists, especially those working from outside the safety of the capital Kathmandu,” says Dharmendra Jha, president of the Federation of Nepalese Journalists.

There have been 14 incidents against journalists that range from murder to threats in 2010 alone, according to the federation, an umbrella organisation of journalists in the country.

Of the 14 incidents reported this year, seven took place in the restive Tarai region, where more than half of the 109 groups, many of them armed, that the Home Ministry identified last year are operating.

Armed groups proliferated in the Tarai in the aftermath of the 2007 ‘Madhes Andolan’, an uprising demanding a separate state that stretches from the east to the west of Nepal for the people living in the plains.

A number of these groups cashed in on the political instability and dismal law and order situation after the uprising, which took place in the more open political space after the end of the Maoist insurgency and Nepal’s shift from a constitutional monarchy to a multi-party republican system in 2008. Because armed oufits operate freely in the Tarai, along the country’s border with India, it is no wonder that journalists feel especially vulnerable there.

“These groups see the attack on the media as an easy way to send across the message about their capability. They want to essentially say that ‘if we can attack the people in the media, we can attack anyone.’ Extortion and intimidation then becomes easier,” says Ameet Dhakal, editor-in-chief of ‘Republica’, an English-language national daily published from Kathmandu.

“The rising violence against journalists is directly related to the government’s inability to nab past offenders,” adds Jha.

The Committee to Protect Journalists’ Impunity Index 2009 places Nepal eighth in a list of 14 countries where “journalists are slain and killers go free.”

Dhakal does not rule out the danger of self-censorship becoming more widespread. However, he believes that the Nepalese media as a whole are “extremely resilient” and cannot be cowed down by violent elements.

“We stood our ground during the 10-year-long Maoist insurgency when violence against journalists was regular. We also stood our ground when Gyanendra Shah (the ousted monarch) tried to impose curbs on the media. There is no question of us kneeling down before violent elements now,” he says.

Dhakal’s sentiment was echoed by the Editors’ Alliance, a group of 13 editors with English- and Nepali-language national dailies and magazines that came out with front-page articles and special editorials on Mar. 3 condemning the latest killings and violence against journalists.

But proclamations of commitment to fearless journalism are “easier said than done,” says Tiwari, who reports from eastern Nepal for ‘Republica’ and its sister publication ‘Nagarik’. He used to work for ‘Janakpur Today’ for eight years.

“We have to be on the safe side. We cannot take on the growing number of militant outfits on our own,” he points out.

Apart from Singhaniya’s murder, there are other unresolved incidents against journalists.

A little over a year ago, Uma Singh, a female journalist working for ‘Radio Today’, which is owned by the same group that publishes ‘Janakpur Today’, was hacked to death by up to 20 men. Though the police concluded that Singh’s sister-in-law had hired killers to secure her claim to family property, most others still suspected that the murder was connected to her work.

Journalists in other parts of the country have been coming under attacks as well.

In early December 2009, Rukum district-based female journalist Tika Bista, who is associated with the vernacular national daily ‘Rajdhani’ published from the capital, sustained a near-fatal attack allegedly by Maoist cadres after she published an article – critical of the Maoist party – in a local newspaper of the midwestern district.

Private media flourished in Nepal only after the 1990 ‘People’s Movement’, which brought to an end the absolute monarchy and led to the start of constitutional democracy in the country. Prior to that, Nepal only had a couple of state-owned dailies and a television channel and some tabloids.