I am in Nepal to send a message to the world. The rooftops of the world are caving in. This tragedy is unfolding in two perilous chapters. Phase one is the story of melting glaciers and ice sheets. Record temperature means record glacier melt.
Nepal has lost close to one-third of its ice in just over thirty years. Antarctica and Greenland are losing billions of tons of ice mass every year. Melting glaciers means swollen lakes and rivers flooding, sweeping a away entire communities.
Sea is rising at record rates, threating coastal communities across the globe. The crisis is gaining speed. Nepal’s glaciers melted sixty-five percent faster in the last decade than they had in the previous one.
That means phase two of this tragedy looms ever larger the disappearance of glaciers altogether. Glaciers are icy reservoirs the ones here is the Himalayas supply fresh water to well over a billion people.
When they shrink, so do river flows. In the future major Himalayan river like the Hindus, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra could have massively reduced flows. Combined with salt water intrusion that would decimate deltas. That spells catastrophe.
Low lying countries and communities erased forever. Millions of people on the move and fierce competition for water and land. And floods, droughts and landslides accelerating worldwide. I’m here to cry out from the rooftop of the world. Stop the madness. The glaciers are retreating but we cannot. We must end the fossil fuel age. We must act now to protect people on the frontline. And to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees to avert the world of climate chaos. The world cannot wait.
