Thursday, August 19, 2021

Under climate stress, human innovation set stage for population surge

Research highlights importance of social resilience in Bronze Age China

Summary:

Aridification in the central plains of China during the early Bronze Age did not cause population collapse, a result that highlights the importance of social resilience to climate change. Instead of a collapse amid dry conditions, development of agriculture and increasingly complex human social structures set the stage for a dramatic increase in human population around 3,900 to 3,500 years ago.

Climate alone is not a driver for human behavior. The choices that people make in the face of changing conditions take place in a larger human context. And studies that combine insights from archaeologists and environmental scientists can offer more nuanced lessons about how people have responded -- sometimes successfully -- to long-term environmental changes.

One such study, from researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, shows that aridification in the central plains of China during the early Bronze Age did not cause population collapse, a result that highlights the importance of social resilience to climate change.

Instead of a collapse amid dry conditions, development of agriculture and increasingly complex human social structures set the stage for a dramatic increase in human population around 3,900 to 3,500 years ago.

"In China, especially, there has been a relatively simplistic view of the effects of climate," said Tristram R. "T.R." Kidder, the Edward S. and Tedi Macias Professor of Anthropology in Arts & Sciences. The new study was posted online in Environmental Research Letters.

"Our work shows that we need to have a nuanced appreciation of human resilience as we consider the effects of climate and its effects on human societies," Kidder said. "We have remarkable capacity to adapt. But part of the lesson here is that our social, political and technological systems have to be flexible.

"People in the past were able to overcome climate adversity because they were willing to change," he said.

The new study is one of the first attempts to quantify the types and rates of demographic and subsistence changes over the course of thousands of years in the central plains of China.

By combining information about climate, archaeology and vegetation, the authors mapped out an ambitious story about what changed, when it changed and how those changes were related to human social structures at the time.

Researchers used pollen data from a lake sediment core collected in Henan Province to interpret historical climate conditions. In this area, they found that a warm and wet climate about 9,000 to 4,000 years ago shifted to a cool and dry climate during the Neolithic-Bronze Age transition (about 4,000 to 3,700 years ago). The researchers then used radiocarbon dating and other archaeological data to determine what people were growing and eating during periods of significant population surges and declines in this timeframe.

Confronted with the fluctuation and limitation of resources caused by episodes of climatic aridification, people expanded the number of plants they cultivated for food, the researchers found. They embraced new diversity in agriculture -- including foxtail millet, broomcorn millet, wheat, soybean and rice -- all of which reduced the risks of food production.

This also was a time marked by innovations in water management approaches for irrigation, as well as new metal tools. Social structures also shifted to accommodate and accelerate these examples of human adaptive ingenuity.

"Certainly, by 4,000 years ago, which is when we see this change in the overall environmental condition, this is a society with complicated political, social and economic institutions," Kidder said. "And what I think we are seeing is the capacity of these institutions to buffer and to deal with the climatic variation. When we talk about changes in subsistence strategies, these changes didn't happen automatically. These are human choices."

With this and other related research work, Kidder has argued that early Chinese cities provide an important context that closely resembles modern cities, where high-density urbanism is supported by intensive agriculture. They provide a better historical analog than the Maya world or those in southeast Asia, notably Angkor Wat and the Khmer Kingdom. Those were cities where lower density and food production did not put the same sorts of demands on the physical environment.

Lead author Ren Xiaolin, assistant professor at the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, worked closely with Kidder and others in his laboratory to develop the theory and framework for how to think about environmental changes and urbanism in China.

"Climate change does not always equal collapse -- and this is an important point in both a prehistoric and modern context," said Michael Storozum, another co-author and research fellow at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Storozum is a PhD graduate of Washington University, where he studied under Kidder.

"Humans have been heavily modifying their environments for thousands of years, often in the pursuit of increasing food production which grants societies a higher degree of social resilience," Storozum said.

He draws connections between the findings from this paper and his current research as part of The Wall project, a study of people and ecology in medieval Mongolia and China.

"As more environmental scientists and archaeologists work together, I expect that our understanding of what makes a society resilient to climate change in prehistoric and historical times will grow as well," Storozum said.

Kidder added: "We need to think carefully about how we understand the capacity of people to change their world."

Date: February 26, 2021

Source: Washington University in St. Louis

Journal Reference:
Xiaolin Ren, Junjie Xu, Hui Wang, Michael Storozum, Peng Lu, Duowen Mo, Tuoyu Li, Jianguo Xiong, Tristram R. Kidder. Holocene fluctuations in vegetation and human population demonstrate social resilience in the prehistory of the Central Plains of China. Environmental Research Letters, 2021; DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/abdf0a

Washington University in St. Louis. "Under climate stress, human innovation set stage for population surge: Research highlights importance of social resilience in Bronze Age China." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 26 February 2021. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/02/210226121247.htm>

How water shortages are brewing wars

(Image credit: Asaad Niazi/AFP/Getty Images)

By Sandy Milne

16th August 2021

Unprecedented levels of dam building and water extraction by nations on great rivers are leaving countries further downstream increasingly thirsty, increasing the risk of conflicts.

Speaking to me via Zoom from his flat in Amsterdam, Ali al-Sadr pauses to take a sip from a clear glass of water. The irony dawning on him, he lets out a laugh. "Before I left Iraq, I struggled every day to find clean drinking water." Three years earlier, al-Sadr had joined protests in the streets of his native Basra, demanding the authorities address the city's growing water crisis.

"Before the war, Basra was a beautiful place," adds the 29-year-old. "They used to call us the Venice of the East." Bordered on one side by the Shatt al-Arab River, the city is skewered by a network of freshwater canals. al-Sadr, a dockhand, once loved working alongside them. "But by the time I left, they were pumping raw sewage into the waterways. We couldn't wash, the smell [of the river] gave me migraines and, when I finally fell sick, I spent four days in bed." In the summer of 2018, tainted water sent 120,000 Basrans to the city's hospitals – and, when police opened fire on those who protested, al Sadr was lucky to escape with his life. "Within a month I packed my bags and left for Europe," he says.

Around the world, stories like al Sadr's are becoming far too common. As much as a quarter of the world's population now faces severe water scarcity at least one month out of the year and – as in al-Sadr's case – it is leading many to seek a more secure life in other countries. "If there is no water, people will start to move," says Kitty van der Heijden, chief of international cooperation at the Netherlands' foreign ministry and an expert in hydropolitics. Water scarcity affects roughly 40% of the world's population and, according to predictions by the United Nations and the World Bank, drought could put up to 700 million people at risk of displacement by 2030. People like van der Heijden are concerned about what that could lead to.

"If there is no water, politicians are going to try and get their hands on it and they might start to fight over it," she says.

Over the course of the 20th Century, global water use grew at more than twice the rate of population increase. Today, this dissonance is leading many cities – from Rome to Cape Town, Chennai to Lima – to ration water. Water crises have been ranked in the top five of the World Economic Forum's Global Risks by Impact list nearly every year since 2012. In 2017, severe droughts contributed to the worst humanitarian crisis since World War Two, when 20 million people across Africa and the Middle East were forced to leave their homes due to the accompanying food shortages and conflicts that erupted.

Peter Gleick, head of the Oakland-based Pacific Institute, has spent the last three decades studying the link between water scarcity, conflict and migration and believes that water conflict is on the rise. "With very rare exceptions, no one dies of literal thirst," he says. "But more and more people are dying from contaminated water or conflicts over access to water."

Falling water quality around Basra, southern Iraq, has been exacerbated by reduced river flows due to damming in Turkey (Credit: Haidar Mohammed Ali/AFP/Getty Images)

Gleick and his team are behind the Water Conflict Chronology: a log of 925 water conflicts, large and small, stretching back to the days of the Babylonian king Hammurabi. It is not, by any means, exhaustive and the conflicts listed vary from full blown wars to disputes between neighbours. But what they reveal is that the relationship between water and conflict is a complex one.

"We categorised water conflicts in three groups," says Gleick. "As a 'trigger' of conflict, where violence is associated with disputes over access and control of water; as a 'weapon' of conflict, where water or water systems are used as weapons in conflicts, including for the use of dams to withhold water or flood downstream communities; and as 'casualties' or 'targets' of conflicts, where water resources or treatment plants or pipelines are targeted during conflicts."

Leaf through the records he and his colleagues have compiled, however, and it becomes clear that the bulk of the conflicts are agriculture-related. It's perhaps not surprising as agriculture accounts for 70% of freshwater use. In the semi-arid Sahel region of Africa, for example, there are regular reports of herdsmen and crop farmers clashing violently over scarce supplies of water needed for their animals and crops.

But as demand for water grows, so too does the scale of the potential conflicts.

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"The latest research on the subject does indeed show water-related violence increasing over time," says Charles Iceland, global director for water at the World Resources Institute. "Population growth and economic development are driving increasing water demand worldwide. Meanwhile, climate change is decreasing water supply and/or making rainfall increasingly erratic in many places."

Nowhere is the dual effect of water stress and climate change more evident than the wider Tigris-Euphrates Basin – comprising Turkey, Syria, Iraq and western Iran. According to satellite imagery, the region is losing groundwater faster than almost anywhere else in the world. And as some countries make desperate attempts to secure their water supplies, their actions are affecting their neighbours.

India's Northern Plains are one of the most fertile farming areas in the world, yet today, villagers regularly clash over water scarcity

During June 2019, as Iraqi cities sweltered through a 50C (122F) heatwave, Turkey said it would begin filling its Ilisu dam at the origins of the Tigris. It is the latest in a long-running project by Turkey to build 22 dams and power plants along the Tigris and the Euphrates that, according to a report by the French International Office for Water, is significantly affecting the flow of water into Syria, Iraq and Iran. It claims that when complete Turkey's Guneydogu Anadolu Projesi (GAP) could include as many as 90 dams and 60 power plants. (See how dams such as the Ilisu are reshaping our planet.)

As water levels behind the mile-wide Ilisu dam rose, the flow from the river into Iraq halved. Thousands of kilometres away in Basra, al-Sadr and his neighbours saw the quality of their water deteriorate. In August, hundreds of people began pouring into Basra's hospitals suffering from rashes, abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhoea, and even cholera, according to Human Rights Watch.

"There's actually two parts to the story in Basra," Iceland says. "Firstly, you have the obvious discharge of wastewater into local waterways without any treatment. But you've also got to consider the damming at the Turkish border – with less freshwater flowing down the Tigris and Euphrates, saltwater is intruding further up the river (from the Persian Gulf). Over time, it's ruining crops and it's making people sick."

It's a complicated picture, but this ability to see links between the seemingly disparate has informed Iceland's work with the Dutch government-funded Water, Peace and Security (WPS) partnership, a group of six American and European NGOs (including the Pacific Institute and the World Resources Institute). They've developed a Global Early Warning Tool, which uses machine learning to predict conflicts before they happen. It combines data about rainfall, crop failures, population density, wealth, agricultural production, levels of corruption, droughts, and flooding, among many other sources of data to produce conflict warnings. They are displayed on a red-and-orange Mercator projection down to the level of administrative districts. Currently it is warning of around 2,000 potential conflict hotspots, with an accuracy rate of 86%. (Read more about how AI can help to identify conflicts before they happen.)

The Indus River is a vital water source for northern India and Pakistan, but originates in the mountains of Tibet that are controlled by China (Credit: Nadeem Khawar/Getty Images)

But while the WPS Tool can be used to identify locations where conflicts over water are at risk of breaking out, it can also help to inform those hoping to understand what is happening in areas that are already experiencing strife due to water scarcity.

India's Northern Plains, for example, are one of the most fertile farming areas in the world, yet today, villagers regularly clash over water scarcity. The underlying data reveals that population growth and high levels of irrigation have outstripped available groundwater supplies. Despite the area's lush-looking cropland, the WPS map ranks nearly every district in Northern India as "extremely high" in terms of baseline water stress. Several key rivers which feed the area – the Indus, Ganges and Sutlej – all originate on the Tibetan side of the border yet are vital for water supplies in both India and Pakistan. compounds the problem. Several border skirmishes have broken out recently between India and China, which lays claim to upstream areas. A violent clash in May last year in the Galwan Valley, through which a tributary to the Indus flows, left 20 Indian soldiers dead. Less than a month later there were reports that China was building "structures" that might dam the river and so restrict its flow into India.

But the data captured by the Global Early Warning tool also reveals some strange trends. In some of the most water-stressed parts of the world, there appears to be a net-migration of people into these areas. Oman, for example, suffers higher levels of drought than Iraq but received hundreds of thousands of migrants per year prior to the pandemic. That's because Oman fares far better than the latter in terms of corruption, water infrastructure, ethnic fractionalisation, and hydropolitical tension. "A community's vulnerability to drought is more important than the drought itself," says Lina Eklund, of a physical geography researcher at Sweden's Lund University.

Water shortages are not simply about drought but also about decreasing water quality due to pollution (Credit: Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Images)

The link between water scarcity and conflict, in other words, isn't as straightforward as it seems. Even where severe drought exists, a complex mix of factors will determine whether it actually leads to conflict: social cohesion being one of the most important. Take the Kurdistan region of Iraq, for example: an area which suffered through the same five-year drought that pushed one-and-a-half million Syrian farmers into urban centres in March 2011. The tight-knit Kurdish community didn't experience the same exodus, discontent, or subsequent infighting. Jessica Hartog, head of natural resource management and climate change at International Alert, a London-based NGO, explains this is because the Syrian government, aiming for food self-sufficiency, had long subsidised agriculture, including fuel, fertiliser, and ground water extraction. When Damascus abruptly scrapped these supports mid-drought, rural families were forced to migrate en masse to urban centres bringing a distrust of the al-Assad regime with them, fueling the bitter civil war that has torn the country to pieces.

But if potential flash-points for conflicts over water can be identified, can something be done to stop them in the future?

Unfortunately, there's no one-size-fits-all solution to water scarcity. In many countries simply reducing loss and leaks could make a huge difference – Iraq loses as much as two-thirds of treated water due to damaged infrastructure. The WPS partners also suggest tackling corruption and reducing agricultural over-abstraction as other key policies that could help. Iceland even suggests increasing the price of water to reflect the cost of its provision – in many parts of the world, humans have grown used to getting water being a cheap and plentiful resource rather than something to be treasured.

Much can also be done by freeing up more water for use through techniques such as desalination of seawater. Saudi Arabia currently meets 50% of its water needs through the process. "Grey", or waste water, recycling can also offer a low-cost, easy-to-implement alternative, which can help farming communities impacted by drought. One assessment of global desalination and wastewater treatment predicted that increased capacity of these could reduce the proportion of the global population under severe water scarcity from 40% to 14%.

At the international level, extensive damming by countries upstream are likely to increase the risk of disputes with those that rely on rivers for much of their water supply further downstream. But Susanne Schmeier, associate professor of water law and diplomacy at IHE Delft in the Netherlands, says that co-riparian conflict is easier to spot and less likely to come to a head. "Local conflicts are much more difficult to control and tend to escalate rapidly – a main difference from the transboundary level, where relations between states often limit the escalation of water-related conflicts," she says

Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia all depend on inflow from the Blue Nile and have long exchanged political blows over the upstream Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam project

Around the world, there's plenty of examples where tensions are high though – the Aral Sea conflict comprising Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan; the Jordan River conflict amongst the Levantine states; the Mekong River dispute between China and its neighbours in Southeast Asia. None have yet boiled over into conflict. But Schmeier also points towards one dispute that is showing signs it might.

Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia all depend on inflow from the Blue Nile and have long exchanged political blows over the upstream Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) project – a dam built at $5bn (£3.6bn), and three times the size of the country's Lake Tana.

When the Ethiopian government announced plans to press ahead regardless, Egypt and Sudan held a joint war exercise in May this year, pointedly called "Guardians of the Nile." It has perhaps the highest risk of spilling into a water war of all the disputes in today's political landscape, but there are several other hotspots around the world. Pakistani officials, for example, have previously referred to India's upstream usage strategy as "fifth-generation warfare", whilst Uzbek President Islam Karimov has warned that regional disputes over water could lead to war.

"I won't name specific countries, but all of this could deteriorate to the point where not just serious confrontation, but even wars could be the result," he said.

Ethiopia's Grand Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile has led to rising tensions with Egypt and Sudan who rely on the river downstream (Credit: Eduardo Soteras/AFP/Getty Images)

Water-sharing agreements are a common way of de-escalating these kinds of dispute. More than 200 have been signed since the end of the Second World War – such as the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty between India and Pakistan, and an agreement between Israel and Jordan signed before their peace treaty. But a more than decade-long attempt by the UN to introduce a global Water Convention on transboundary rivers and lakes has only resulted in 43 countries agreeing to be bound by it.

Hartog says modern treaties will likely need to include a drought mitigation protocol, to assuage downstream countries' fears of being cut-off in a crisis and a dispute resolution mechanism, for when things turn ugly.

In fact, that would mirror the example set by Lesotho, South Africa, Botswana and Namibia who, after tensions bubbled to dangerous levels over shared resources in 2000, intensified cooperation via the Orange-Senqu River Commission (Orasecom). In that example, the establishment of shared watercourse agreements and enshrining the principles of reasonable use proved enough to de-escalate the situation. Where it becomes necessary to free up additional water, though, the research consistently suggests that desalination and wastewater treatment are two of the most efficient strategies.

Perhaps Egypt is heeding this message. The country's government last year brokered a number of deals to open as many as 47 new desalination plants in the country, along with the world's largest wastewater treatment plant. Although the Egyptian authorities have accelerated construction of the plants, the bulk of these projects not due to be completed until after 2030 and the country's water situation continues to degrade. Hartog believes Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan may need to seek outside help if they are to avoid conflict.

"It looks unlikely that the three countries will find an agreement themselves and international diplomatic efforts need to be stepped up to avoid an escalation," she says, adding that pressure is mounting on the increasingly-isolationist government in Addis Ababa. "This might well be the best entry point for countries like the US, Russia and China to join forces to help the riparian countries to secure a trilateral binding agreement."

A water sharing agreement for the Orange-Senqu river basin was signed in 2000, but dams on its tributaries remain controversial (Credit: John Wessels/AFP/Getty Images)

And what of internal conflict? Several smaller nations are blazing their own trails to better manage water. Peru requires water utility providers to reinvest a portion of their profits into research and integrating green infrastructure into stormwater management. Vietnam is cracking down on industrial pollution along its portion of the Mekong Delta, and integrating traditional-built water infrastructure to ensure a more equitable distribution amongst its urban and rural residents.

As climate change and growing human populations continue to compound the problem of droughts around the world – such solutions will become ever more necessary to stop conflict and migration. In December last year – more than two years after Ali al-Sadr left Basra – fewer than 11% of households in the city had access to clean drinking water. An injection of $6.4m (£4.6m/€5.5m) from the Netherlands, facilitated by Unicef, at the end of 2020 is now helping to upgrade the city's creaking water infrastructure, but power cuts earlier this summer shut down many of the city's water pumps amid soaring temperatures.

For those al-Sadr left in the city, the wider implications of their plight are hard to see when faced with daily problems getting clean water and the city was hit by further unrest in recent months. Until the situation gets better, al-Sadr fears the angry demonstrations will continue.

"When I protested, I didn't know what was behind it all," says Ali. "I just wanted something to drink."

Climate change, battery boom threatens life on the 'roof of the world' — the Tibetan Plateau

ABC Radio National /
By Victoria Pengilley and Sasha Fegan for Late Night Live

Posted Tue 18 Sep 2018

Tibetan nomads face many challenges to their traditional way of life, and climate change may be the biggest of all.( Getty: Kevin Frayer)

Climate change is sometimes discussed as a problem of the future, but on the "roof of the world", it has already arrived.

The remote, icy plains of the Tibetan Plateau — the highest and largest plateau on the planet — cover a massive 25 per cent of China's landmass.

It plays an important role — it contains the largest supply of fresh water outside the polar regions, and gives birth to some of Asia's most legendary rivers.

From the Mekong and the Ganges to the Yangtze and the Yellow River, it has nourished civilisations, sustained ecosystems, and inspired religions.

Today it is a lifeline to the estimated 1 billion people who rely on it.

But that lifeline is under threat.

A way of life in danger

Climate change has caused temperatures to rise on the plateau faster than anywhere else in Asia.

As a result, the region's glaciers and grassland are thawing at an alarming rate.

If melting continues, an estimated two-thirds of the plateau's glaciers will be gone by 2050, one scientist told the Asia Society conference in 2009.

That would have a huge impact, says Tsechu Dolma, a Tibetan refugee and founder of the Mountain Resiliency Project, which aims to empower local women with agribusinesses.

"[Around] 1.4 billion people out of the 7 billion human population actually depend on the water that originates from Tibet," she says.

"[The water] carries a lot of silt from the plateau downstream. This silt is needed for the rice paddies in South-East Asia … the food that is grown feeds the rest of the world."

A young Tibetan Buddhist monk with his yak herd.(Getty: Kevin Frayer)

Already thousands of lakes have dried up.

Desert now covers one-sixth of the plateau and places which once bloomed have been reduced to sand dunes.

The most vulnerable people affected, Ms Dolma says, are the traditional farmers and herders whose livelihoods depend on the land.

"The majority of the Tibetans who live inside Tibet continue living as herders and farmers, and for a lot of them their livelihood has become very difficult with climate change," she says.

"Women who gather water and firewood for cooking and eating have to travel further away from their homes, and a lot of young children and other shepherds have to travel further with their livestock to graze.

"[Farmers] are definitely realising how much more difficult it is for them to get food, how unpredictable the climate has been, how unpredictable the water sources have been."

Increased water supply is also said to have caused increased flooding and natural disasters in the area, and locals are now turning to the gods for answers.

"A lot of people are trying to use Buddhist epistemologies to understand what is happening around us," Ms Dolma says.

"They understand it is because of the fact that us humans, we are doing things to degrade our environment and to upset the spirits who live inside the land.

"Because of these disruptions, all these tragedies are happening in the form of floods and fires."

'A vicious cycle of repression and resistance'

It's not the only challenge facing Tibet, a region with a long history of turmoil.

While climate change is slowly transforming the landscape, so too is China, which controls the semi-autonomous region.

In the late 1950s, when China sent in troops to assert its claim over Tibet, thousands of nomads were dispersed and resettled into neighbouring Chinese provinces. Others fled as refugees to Nepal and India.

The mountains and grasslands of the Tibetan Plateau as seen from the air.

(Getty: Kevin Frayer)

Human rights organisations and advocates of Tibetan self-determination have previously denounced China's rule over Tibet, claiming it has led to an eradication of culture, language and traditions.

"Tibet has been under the Chinese occupation for the last 70-odd years, and for all these years there has been a vicious cycle of repression and resistance," says Kyinzom Dhongdue, a Tibetan refugee and journalist for the Times of India.

Ms Dhongdue was born to Tibetan parents in India, where she is a member of the Tibetan Parliament in Exile.

"Although I have never seen the physical Tibet, [it] is very much part of who I am," says Ms Dhongdue, who is now based in Australia.

"It has shaped me as an individual."
The impact of mining

In recent years the Chinese Government has stepped up mining in the Tibetan Plateau, along with transmigration — a forced relocation project that moves Chinese citizens to the region.

Beijing says the project will improve local herders' living standards by moving them to a less populated area.

But activists say it leaves Tibet's natural resources of lead, zinc, asbestos and lithium vulnerable to exploitation.

"The Chinese word for Tibet is called Xizang, which literally means 'western treasure house'," Ms Dhongdue says.

Development in the region is endangering traditional culture and language, Ms Dhongdue says.(Getty: Kevin Frayer)

According to the Environmental Justice Atlas, Tibet holds 90 per cent of China's lithium reserves, and has been a big drawcard for technology companies supplying lithium-based batteries for smart phones, tablets and electric cars.

But the mines are said to have caused increased pollution and villagers say that rivers once filled with fish are now empty.

"The Chinese Government likes to claim that they have brought a lot of development inside Tibet but it has come at a great cost," she says.Ms Dhongdue says development and increased tourism in the region has also exacerbated the already dire effects of climate change.

"It has brought loss of a culture and the development has actually facilitated the transmigration — the influx of a huge number of Chinese migrants to the Tibetan Plateau — and further enabled the marginalisation or the disempowerment of the Tibetan people inside Tibet.

"At face value, if tourists are allowed to go to Tibet, they can see roads being built or schools being built.

"But really at the end of the day we really have to ask the question: development on whose terms and development for whom?"

OPINION
Importance of Tibet’s rivers for Asian water security

China's 'Great Wall of Concrete' damming rivers sourced on the Tibetan Plateau threatens downstream countries

By TENZIN TSULTRIM

DECEMBER 30, 2020

China has launched an array of dam projects along the Tibetan section of the Brahmaputra River. Photo: Xinhua

With the recent signing of the Tibet Policy and Support Act by the president of the United States, which also addresses the strategic importance of the Tibetan Plateau, whose rivers remain one of the major sources of water to more than a billion people living in the downstream Asia countries, the importance of Tibet’s rivers once again comes into focus.

Last month, news about Beijing’s planned construction of a major dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo (in Tibetan, tsangpo means “river”) in Tibet has created a heated debate among scholars, policy analysts and strategists.

Most of the debate has circled around the implications of this project for India. However, one must not forget that the Tibetan Plateau is popularly known as the water tower of Asia, because 90% of the runoff from Tibetan rivers flows into China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Bhutan and Pakistan, providing a steady supply of fresh water, food and energy.

The status of the Plateau of Tibet is unique, as it plays a triple role: It is Asia’s main freshwater repository, its largest water supplier, and its principal rainmaker. Hence it is not only about India, the water security of all of the eastern part of Asia depends on Tibet’s rivers.

The most dammed nation in the world

Since its takeover of Tibet, China has invested heavily in the constructions of major highways, connecting every part of Tibet to the major cities of China. For the past few decades, Beijing has also invested heavily in the construction of dams, one after another, in Tibet.

Michael Buckley, an award-winning Canadian journalist, is author of the 2014 book Meltdown in Tibet, which exposes that China is now on a mission to exploit Tibet’s natural resources leading to the ongoing destruction of Tibet’s environment, calling it “ecocide.”

Buckley writes, “At the tail end of those same rivers lie the world’s largest deltas. One way or another, close to 2 billion people rely on Tibet’s waters – for drinking, for agriculture, for fishing, for industry.”

These rivers are still providing similar ecosystem services to the downstream Asian countries that they provided for centuries before the onset of man-made interruption. Now with China’s construction of dams one after another, everything is changing year after year.

Currently China is one of the most dammed countries in the world. Centuries ago, one of the reasons for China’s construction of the Great Wall was for its security from the militant nomads from Mongolia; now it is building a “Great Wall of Concrete” for its “water security,” but in the process endangering the security and livelihood of downstream Asian countries.

Dechen Palmo, a research fellow at the Tibet Policy Institute (TPI), a think-tank of the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) based in Dharamshala, India, specializes in Tibet’s transboundary rivers and the impacts of China’s damming on China-Occupied Tibet.

Dechen writes: “Over the last seven decades, the People’s Republic of China has constructed more than 87,000 dams. Collectively they generate 352.26 [gigawatts] of power, more than the capacities of Brazil, the United States, and Canada combined. On the other hand, these projects have led to the displacement of over 23 million people.”

Not only this, since the 1950s the Chinese have built some 22,000 dams that are more than 15 meters tall, roughly half the world’s current total. (The World Commission on Dams defines a “large dam” as one being “at least 15 meters in wall height from the base up.”) Imagine the irreversible damage these dams could do to the Asian populations who for centuries enjoyed the free flow of fresh water from free and independent Tibet.

International Rivers, a California-based non-governmental organization, and Michael Buckley have highlighted the impacts of dams in the following way: The high wall of dams itself blocks the migration of fish and other aquatic species and nutrient-rich sediments, leading to the disappearance of birds in floodplains, huge losses of forest, wetlands and farmland, erosion of coastal deltas, and many other impacts.

The blocking of water will also severely impact the irrigation-oriented Asian countries. A great amount of water is utilized in Asia for irrigation of rice, cotton and rubber. Half of the rice in the world is produced and consumed by India and China, while rice is also a staple in Myanmar, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia.
A solution to Asian water insecurity

According to a United Nations report titled “World Population Prospects 2019,” the global population is expected to increase by 2 billion in the next 30 years, from 7.7 billion currently to 9.7 billion in 2050. As rice is one of the most widely consumed grains in the world and particularly in Asia, naturally more rice will be needed by 2050.

Rice is a water-intensive crop. Without the free flow of rivers from the Plateau of Tibet to the downstream Asian countries, which coincidentally include the top eight countries producing the highest volumes of milled rice in the world, a shortage of water will severely impact rice production.

A research paper titled “Projections of Water Stress Based on an Ensemble of Socioeconomic Growth and Climate Change Scenarios: A Case Study in Asia,” published on March 30, 2016, by a team of research scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found: “Economic and population growth on top of climate change could lead to serious water shortages across a broad swath of Asia by the year 2050.”

The MIT researchers also found that by 2050 in Asia, these factors would lead to about a billion more people becoming “water-stressed.” Hence the scarcity of water might change the course of relations among Asian countries and provoke conflict – something that has already happened in the past.

The Pacific Institute, a policy research think-thank founded in 1987 and currently based out of Oakland, California, has chronicled the small and large-scale conflicts fought throughout the centuries over water.

According to its research, the causes of water conflicts have been categorized into three sections:

Trigger: water as a root cause of conflict, where there is a dispute over the control of water or waterways.
Weapon: where water resources are used as a tool or weapon in a violent conflict.
Casualty: water resources as a casualty of conflict, where water resources are intentional targets of violence.

Through this categorization, the institute chronicled around 926 conflicts fought over water since as early as 3000 BC.

From the above developments in the past and China’s chaotic construction of thousands of dams, which is still an ongoing issue, one cannot deny that water resources are soon going to be very contentious, which is the subject of what renowned Indian strategist Brahma Chellaney’s book Water: Asia’s New Battleground.

If China’s current erratic, unscientific and inhumane dam-construction program continues unchecked, soon there will be transnational environmental movement across the Asian countries against China’s monopolistic control over Tibet’s rivers.

Asia is not only about the China Dream, the advancement of China’s strategic or national or party interests while undermining the interests of neighboring countries, including strategic interests. Rather, it is the combined dreams of Asian countries to bring forth the Asian Century.

In short, securing Tibet is not only about the Tibetan people, and Tibetan culture; it is more about securing permanent water security for India and Asia at large.

TENZIN TSULTRIM
Tenzin Tsultrim PhD is a visiting fellow at the Tibet Policy Institute, a think-tank of the Central Tibetan Administration in Dharamsala, India. More by Tenzin Tsultrim

Tibet is "Third Pole and Water Tower of Asia": Rivers flowed throughout Asia

Tibetan Rivers. Photo: File

Dharamshala, India — With an elevation of more than 4,000 meters above mean sea level, the Tibetan Plateau physically dominates the geographical map of the world. The entire plateau stretches for almost 3,000 kilometers from west to east and 1,500 kilometers from south to north. It holds the Hindu Kush Himalayan Ice Sheet, considered as the largest ice mass and reservoir of fresh water apart from the two poles, hence the name ‘Third Pole’.

The Tibetan Plateau is the major resource of big rivers and a rich repository of indispensable freshwater resources that are shared across Asia. A large percentage of the world’s population depends upon rivers originating in Tibet, including the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween and Mekong rivers. Incomplete statistics show that there are more than ten rivers in Tibet with drainage areas greater than 10,000 square kilometers.

Tibet is also known as the ‘Water Tower of Asia’ as it serves as the source of ten major Asian river systems flowing into ten countries, including many of the most densely populated nations in the world: China, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, Burma, Bangladesh, and Bhutan. The rivers of Tibet are characterized by an uneven seasonal distribution of runoff, low water temperature, abundant flow, small inter-annual change, low sand content, and good water quality. Of the world’s 7.7 billion people, for more than 1 billion living in South Asia from Afghanistan to the Ganga-Meghna-Brahmaputra basin and in Southeast Asia, the rivers flowing from Tibet constitute the lifeline.

The Zachu or Mekong River, originating from central Tibet through Yunan province in China and then flowing through Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and finally ending its journey in Vietnam is the lifeline for the people living in Mekong-region countries. This river directly supports approximately 70 million people along its basin from fishermen to farmers.

Beyond the populations residing in the watersheds of these rivers are the additional millions of people who depend on monsoon rains drawn inland by the Tibetan Plateau. It was also indicated that the Southeast Asian monsoon that recharges most of the rivers downstream varies in intensity according to the snow cover on the Tibetan Plateau. For China alone, 30 percent of its fresh water supply is met from the rivers flowing from Tibet. These rivers give hope to and sustain life of millions of people downstream, from the arid plains of India and Pakistan to the rice paddies of Southeast Asian countries.

However, rapid population growth, industrialization and climate change threaten water security across South and South-East Asia. With China, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand all dependent on rivers that have their headwaters in Tibet, predicted water shortages threaten the livelihoods of millions of people living in countries downstream. Tibet is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. Glaciers are melting, putting millions of people downstream at risk from floods, water shortages and sea level rises, threatening coastal communities.

China, which requires water to meet the needs of approximately 20 percent of the world’s population, has harnessed freshwater from the Tibetan plateau to meet its own food and water requirements by building dams, irrigation systems and creating water diversion projects. Despite the critical state of the Tibetan plateau which remains ecologically sensitive and seismically active due to its high elevation, China is still moving on with its ambitious plan to expand the hydropower generation on the headwaters of Asia’s major rivers — the Yangtze, Yellow, Brahmaputra, Indus, Mekong, and Salween Rivers.

Chinese control in Tibet places China in a dominant position to control Asia’s water sources. Dwindling water sources in the trans-boundary rivers of the Tibetan Plateau threaten water security and create a high potential for geopolitical conflict in the region. As a result of dam building, however, the countries downstream have been, and will remain, negatively affected through altered water flow and increased sedimentation.

The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) has revealed alarming details about the sustainability of the Himalayan glaciers in the time of climate change. According to their findings, the current trend of melting glaciers suggests that the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Indus and other rivers across the northern India plains would most likely become seasonal rivers in the near future, flowing only in the monsoon season and drying up during winters. In this way, downstream agriculture will be seriously affected and soil salinity will increase.

World Wide Fund (WWF) for Nature, formerly known as World Wildlife Fund, named the Indus River as one of the world’s ten rivers most at risk. The Indus river which already faces an acute shortage of water flow due to climate change suffered more obstruction after China built a dam on the dying river (in Ngari, Western Tibet) without informing the downstream countries - India and Pakistan.

So far China has dammed every major river and its tributaries in Tibet and has unveiled plans to construct even more dams in the coming years. The Chinese dam building boom and its water transfer projects are creating additional worries to the lower riparian states, especially in India where it was estimated that by 2030 the water demand will be higher by 50 percent from the current demand of 740 billion cubic meters.

The damming activities along the upstream of Mekong have significantly affected the flow volume of the river. Fishing boats are seen stranded on the shores of the dried Mekong River in Mukdahan Province and at Nakhon Panam in Thailand. The livelihoods of the local fishermen and many other communities from Cambodia are threatened by the reduced flow of the river water but their concerned voices are muffled by the aid their government receives from China. Thailand has vested interests in China’s hydropower production as it purchases 3000 megawatts of power generated by Chinese dams. Economic interaction between the countries through which a river flows complicates the issue of trans-boundary river negotiations and creates confusion regarding future food and water security.

Not only are these rivers and tributaries dammed for generating electricity but some are also polluted with chemicals and other toxins dangerous for human consumption. Industrial activities also threaten the quality of Tibetan freshwater. Previous deforestation has created erosion and siltation. Mining and industrial development has contributed to pollution from heavy metals within Tibet. For instance, the tap water of Kumbum monastery in Amdo detected high concentrations of lead (Pb) due to a mining activity. Similar cases of mining chemicals polluting the natural water supply are common wherever mining activities are prevalent.

Tibetan land is delicate and it cannot absorb the river water diversion projects, constructions of dams, mining and transportation, industrial and other activities. Such activities are leading to receding glaciers in Tibet and in the Himalayas. There are also reports that the Tibetan nomads are gradually being made to shift from their traditional grassland and resettle in bleak villages. Unfortunately, these activities might invite eco-disaster. This might aggravate the meltdown of Himalayan glaciers, further resulting in the drying of rivers. Therefore, the Tibet water resources should be accepted as a global common. Any distortion in the ecology of Tibet and its delicate river system is likely to affect the global environment. The impact on Tibet’s landscape and its natural resources due to climate warming and human intervention will threaten not only the future food and water security of many nations but also their development.

Environmentalist Tempa highlights environmental problems in Tibet, their causes and impacts

His Holiness the Dalai Lama calls on world to speak up for the protection of Tibet's ecology

AASHNA THAKUR

01 FEBRUARY 2021

Tibet Life Rivers

Tibet-The-Third-Pole-Importance-of-Environmental-Stewardship.pdf

SACRED MOUNTAIN

Why the Tibetan Plateau Might Be the Ideal Spot for the Telescope of the Future

A team in China has identified a location that could give the Eastern Hemisphere its first major observatory

Construction of multiple telescopes has begun on Saishiteng Mountain—near the town of Lenghu in the Qinghai province of China. The site could be China’s first major observatory, on par with those in Hawaii, Chile, and the Canary Islands. (Licai Deng, Chinese Academy of Sciences)

By Corryn Wetzel

SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
AUGUST 18, 2021

A team of Chinese scientists has identified a location on the Tibetan Plateau that could host some of the world’s most powerful telescopes. The high-elevation plateau has been considered for observatory sites before, but the paper published today in Nature pinpoints a site that holds particular promise. A multi-year assessment suggests the site meets all the key parameters for a world-class observatory, including dark skies, high elevation, low humidity and more.

Chinese astronomers are eager to get a powerful observatory in their country, “but first of all, we need to find a place to put the telescope” says Licai Deng, an astronomer at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and lead author of the study. Though China has a number of smaller observatories across the country, Deng says they’ve only recently been able to fund large telescope projects.

When Deng and his team began searching for an observatory site, they looked for a specific combination of factors. Unlike backyard telescopes amateur astronomers use to spot stars and planets on a cloudless night, high-sensitive, massive optical and infrared telescopes require extreme conditions. The telescope China hopes to build, says Deng, could have an aperture—the diameter of the telescope’s light-gathering lens or mirror—of 100 feet and be the world’s largest, at least for a short time. Europe’s Extreme Large Telescope, which is slated to be complete in 2027, has a primary mirror of 138 feet and is the largest telescope ever planned.

When selecting a location for an observatory, “we tend to look for the not any one individual trait, but the best, optimal combination of multiple traits,” says John O’Meara, chief scientist at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Mauna Kea, Hawai’i, who wasn’t involved in the work. Observatories need be remote enough to avoid the polluting light of nearby cities, but still possible for scientists to access. Telescopes should be built at high elevations to avoid blurring caused by the atmosphere, but not so high that humans can’t visit. Too much wind, dust or water vapor can impede a telescope’s accuracy.

As the region with highest elevation of any on Earth, the Tibetan Plateau has long been of interest to both Chinese and international astronomers. To narrow down their search on the Plateau, Deng and his team first looked at weather information and satellite data to find places with clear, dark skies. They were excited when they saw that the city Lenghu, which hadn’t been considered until then, had 3,500 annual hours of sunshine a year and barely a drizzle of rain. They then identified an ideal observatory site on the nearby Saishiteng Mountain, which sits 5,000 feet above the city.

In 2018, the team from the Chinese Academy of Science set up equipment on the mountain to monitor conditions that could interfere with a clear view of the sky: dust, cloud cover, turbulence, water vapor and more. After three years of data collection and analysis, the team agreed that the location had conditions on par with some of the best observatory sites in the world.

Gary Hill, the chief astronomer at the University of Texas’ McDonald Observatory who was not involved in the study, was particularly impressed by the site’s darkness. “If you go through the expense of building a telescope of that scale, you want to be able to have very good sensitivity to extremely faint objects,” says Hill. “Many sites that started off very dark increasingly have trouble with encroaching civilization and the stray light pollution that brings.” Since the mountain is far from major cities the area is likely to stay dark for a while. Overall, Hill thinks “it’s an extremely promising site.”

Because the site is so far inland, it avoids some—but not all—of the moisture that complicates the use of infrared telescopes. Water vapor absorbs infrared radiation which is “a real killer” for certain telescopes says Scott Paine an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who was not involved in the research. For most of the year, he suspects water vapor wouldn’t be an issue but suspects it could post a challenge during wetter summer months.

Because all high-quality astronomical observatories are located in the Western Hemisphere, an observatory on the Tibetan Plateau could bridge a gap. If astronomers want to continually monitor an event happening over the course of a day, for example, they have to collaborate across observatories, like runners passing a baton. “Say there's a particularly unusual event, like two black holes merge or two neutron stars merge, where every data point counts as the Earth rotates,” says Patrick McCarthy, director of the NOIRLab, who was not involved in the work. “Right now, there are just gaps in time. There are parts of the earth that aren't covered. By putting an observatory in this longitude range in the middle of continental Asia, that gives us that extra time coverage that we don't have now.”

The world’s top observatories in Chile, Hawai’i and the Canary Islands stand to benefit from the uninterrupted monitoring that a site in the Eastern Hemisphere provides. “The international astronomical community is very collaborative because we're looking at the same sky,” says Deng. Though conduction and observations are being led by Chinese scientists, Deng says he’s looking forward to eventually opening the site at Lenghu to international astronomers.

Soon after the team completed their analysis, they broke ground on the observatory. “Construction is going on as we speak,” says Deng. The site already has a small working telescope and will soon host a 21-foot telescope, which will surpass the county’s 16-foot LAMOST telescope to become China’s biggest. The growing observatory is on track to become the next hub of Chinese astronomy, says Deng. The observations that they record over the next few years will help determine if the site is as promising as the initial assessment suggests. If so, Deng is hopeful that the site at Lenghu could be home to the next-generation giant Chinese telescope.

Semisopochnoi volcano (Aleutian Islands): explosive activity continues

Wed, 18 Aug 2021, 05:15

05:15 AM | BY: MARTIN

Ash explosion from Semisopochnoi volcano on 14 August (image: AVO)

No significant change in the activity has occurred since the last update and remains unchanged.
The volcanic-seismic unrest at the volcano continues that indicates near-constant explosions from the North Cerberus crater.
Ash plumes reached 10,000 ft (3,000 m) altitude and drifted into various directions, but most often W-SE direction.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment

Thursday, August 19, 2021

SACRED MOUNTAIN

Why the Tibetan Plateau Might Be the Ideal Spot for the Telescope of the Future

A team in China has identified a location that could give the Eastern Hemisphere its first major observatory

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