Nepal's Climate Change

Farmer Barati Khadka sits in his home, eating a typical Nepalese meal of dal-bhat and rice, in his hut in the small Nepalese village of Bhawasa, about 90 miles east of Kathmandu. During the night there is light rain but its intensity increases. Within an hour, the rain becomes so heavy that Barati cannot see more than a foot in front of him, even though it is full moon. It rains like that until midday. Then the land starts moving like a cobra.

When it stopped, Mr Khadka barely recognised his village. In just a few hours the serpent had carved a 1000 foot wide path down the valley, leaving a ten foot-deep landcape of rocks, boulders, trees and rubble in its path. Hundreds of fields and terraces had been swept away. The irrigation systems built by generations of farmers had gone and houses were demolished or were now uninhabitable. Mr Khadka’s home stood isolated on a newly formed island.

Bhawasa expects a small flood every decade or so, but the two largest have taken place in the last three years. The floods are coming more severely, more frequently. The rainfall far heavier these days and coming at different times of the year.

Nepal is on the front line of climate change and variations on Bhawasa’s experience are now being recorded in communities from the Himalayas in the freezing north to the heat of the southern lowland plains.

Crop yields are down. Barati now lives with 200 other environmental change refugees in tents in a small grove of trees by a highway. The refugees are marking their observations of a changing climate. One notes that wild pigs in the forest now have their young earlier, another that certain types of rice and cucumber will no longer grow where they used to, a third says that the days are hotter and that some trees now flower twice a year.

Scientists in Nepal are recording some of the fastest long-term increases in temperatures and rainfall anywhere in the world. At least 44 of Nepal's and neighbouring Bhutan's Himalayan lakes, which collect glacier melt-water, are said by the UN to be growing so rapidly they they could burst their banks within a decade. Any climate change in Nepal is reflected throughout the region. Nearly 400 million people in northern India and Bangladesh also depend on rainfall and rivers that rise there.

Some real world conversions in US$:
$16: Solar dryer to help preserve fruit and vegetables for the winter season
$25: Local materials to insulate a home
$55: Smoke hood to protect from indoor pollution from open fires
$75: Manufacture and installation of a smoke hood
$235: Bicycle ambulance
$1560: Gravity ropeway in mountainous regions for access to markets and schools

· The average US citizen produces 126 times more carbon dioxide than someone living in Nepal
· CO2 emissions from using an electric kettle for one year in the US are equivalent to average person's total annual CO2 emissions in Nepal