Asia’s Glaciers are Melting Rapidly, but these 3 Steps can Save Lives and Infrastructure

Raging water disrupted life in Thame village, home to some of Nepal’s famed Sherpas, when a glacial lake in the Everest region burst its banks in August last year. The outburst wreaked havoc, damaging homes, farms, a school, and a hydropower plant that provided electricity to local villages.

Despite the extensive damage, thankfully, there were no fatalities due to the quick thinking of locals and the fact that the flood arrived in the middle of the day, allowing everyone to evacuate to safety. With glacial lake outburst floods projected to happen more often in the Hindu Kush Himalayas though, systematic risk reduction is needed across the region.

The Hindu Kush Himalayas holds the world’s largest ice reserves outside the polar regions and extends 3,500 kilometers over Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, the People’s Republic of China, India, Myanmar, Nepal, and Pakistan. Meltwater from glaciers provide freshwater for drinking, irrigation for agriculture, hydropower and water-intensive industries. But Hindu Kush Himalayan glaciers melted 65% faster in 2011 to 2020 than the decade before, according to the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD). The occurrence of glacial lake outburst floods is now projected to triple by the end of the century. This threatens many of the 240 million people living in the mountains and 1.65 billion living downstream.

Glacial lake outburst floods begin with a catastrophic wave that causes extreme dynamic impact, erosion, inundation, and sediment burial that immediately endangers infrastructure, farmlands, and lives. The damage then leads to longer term impacts like property damage from unstable ground and slow-moving landslides, new seasonal flooding from changes in river channels, and loss of livelihoods.

  To minimize the impacts of these cascading hazards on people and infrastructure, we need to approach development differently. With support from Germany and Switzerland which face similar challenges with unprecedented glacial melt in the Alps and downstream, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) is helping Bhutan and Nepal develop cost-effective adaptation solutions – such as establishing climate-resilient infrastructure and early warning systems – that could be replicated across the Hindu Kush Himalaya region with the right government policies and a conducive enabling environment for adaptation.

To minimize the risk, here are three steps for governments to take:

First, a better understanding of multi-hazard risks is needed to support risk reduction decisions. This entails compiling and analyzing existing information on topography, hazards, and locations of infrastructure and populations from maps, satellite imagery, and inventories. This information, combined with local knowledge, needs to be tailored to support specific risk reduction decisions. If applied well, government officials, investors, and other stakeholders should be able to use a web-based platform that identifies zones of relative safety and danger from mountain hazards to support land use decisions. Information about hazard frequency and intensity provided in that platform, along with building and infrastructure design standards, would then be used to support design and rehabilitation decisions that promote resilience.

Second, risk reduction measures need to be cost-effective. Risk reduction options include: building new infrastructure and retrofitting existing infrastructure to be resilient to mountain hazards; implementing a risk-informed land use plan; or establishing early warning and evacuation systems to save lives. When faced with a problem, the initial impulse is often to try to stop it at its source: for example, stabilize the landslide or drain the glacial lake. This is feasible in some cases, but impractical and too expensive in the Hindu Kush Himalaya region overall given the geology, fragile topography, scale and number of hazards. There are also limited financial, material, and human capacity resources in many countries, which exacerbates the challenge. Therefore,   ADB is developing tools to demonstrate the financial benefits and cost-effectiveness of risk management measures—and working with governments and the private sector to embed these tools in their decision-making.

Third, a regional perspective is critical. Glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalayas feed 10 major rivers in Asia. This means risks from glacial melt impacts are transboundary. Countries will benefit from sharing information to help them prepare against potential flooding and related hazards. Sharing lessons learned from past disasters, as well as effective risk reduction practices and financing solutions that have been tried and tested, can help each country make better investment and policy decisions.

In all cases, it’s important to leverage local knowledge and actively involve the affected communities. As the Thame glacial lake flooding incident demonstrated, local knowledge is vital to saving lives in the face of impending disasters.

  With accelerated glacial melt affecting nearly 2 billion people in the Hindu Kush Himalayas, governments, development institutions, and the private sector must invest more in building resilience in both mountainous and downstream areas. We must mobilize concessional financing while developing new sources of financing such as carbon and capital markets, blended finance, and risk transfer solutions.

Of course, there are limits to the prevention of losses through adaptation and more needs to be done to reduce carbon dioxide, methane, and other emissions. If global temperatures rise by 3 degrees Celsius, up to 75% of glaciers in parts of the Himalayas will be lost throughout the century, which will ultimately threaten water availability and food security.

Countries need to be ambitious when they finalize their Nationally Determined Contributions this year, the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation, to slow glacial retreat—and avoid further increasing the hazards that much of Asia is already facing.

This article was written by ADB Principal Economist Declan Magee, ADB Senior Climate Change Officer Avani Dixit, and BGC Engineering Principal Geological Engineer Alex Strouth, with contributions from BGC Engineering Senior Geological Engineer Emily Mark. It was first published in The Kathmandu Post.

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