Tackling climate change one rock at a time

Tackling climate change one rock at a time

Whitewashing a mountain in Peru, creating artificial glaciers in Ladakh and trying to hold back the ocean in the Maldives – some ingenious schemes to combat climate change are highlighted in Gaia Vince's latest book, Adventures In The Anthropocene

Gaia Vince
The Guardian, Friday 27 June 2014

Temples rise above mud-brick houses and castles. Prayer flags flutter from every roof and woollen-cloaked men and women with brightly coloured waist-sashes stand in the street gossiping. I'm in northern India's remote Trans-Himalaya, in the ancient kingdom of Ladakh. Consisting entirely of mountains, this, the highest inhabited region on Earth, was settled by pilgrims and traders travelling the silk route between Tibet and India or Iran, and is home to a mainly Tantric Buddhist population.

In Stakmo village, farmers are preparing for harvest. The scene feels timeless. And yet much has changed, the villagers say. "By mid-September, we would wake up with completely frozen moustaches," says Tashi, a 76-year-old farmer, who wears a woollen hat and large, pink-tinted sunglasses. I'm above 4,000 metres (13,000ft), but it is not cold enough to freeze moustaches – from the clear, cloudless sky, the sun beams down intensely, as it does for more than 300 days of the year, and it's burning my European face. Wedged between Pakistan, Afghanistan and China (or, more accurately, Tibet), Ladakh was a latecomer to the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, and remains a contested territory. At night the Indian and Pakistani border patrols take pot shots at each other; the Chinese come and paint Indian rocks red, and the Indians respond by painting Chinese boulders green. But Stakmo feels very far from such nationalistic posturing. The villagers are more concerned with the ancient and essential task of coaxing food from the mountains' mustard-coloured desert soils. The mountains are changing colour before people's eyes: from white to tobacco as the glaciers disappear. And with them, Ladakh's only reliable water source.

The snows used to arrive after October and build during the winter. Then, in March, the snowpack would begin melting, providing vital and timely irrigation for the sowing of the area's barley crop. But the past decade has seen a gradual reduction in snowfall. When the precipitation does come, it arrives as rain during the harvest season, ruining what few crops the villagers have in the fields.

Glacial melting is accelerating every year, with current annual retreat rates of 70 metres for some glaciers. Mountains are changing dramatically and so fast that we can use recent Google Earth images to watch the white bits shrink. Melting rates have already exceeded those predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – they expect 70% of the region's glaciers to disappear by the end of the century. Meltwater from small mountain glaciers alone already accounts for 40% of current global sea-level rise, and is predicted to add at least 12cm to sea levels by 2100.

More:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/28/ingenious-schemes-combat-climate-change-gaia-vince-adventures-in-the-anthropocene