This is a C. N. A podcast up in the mountains. Climate change is remaking the rules, temperatures are soaring in the Himalayas and that's causing glaciers to retreat at an alarming speed threatened with floods and dry spells. Families living in the remote mountains are now forced to make hard choices. My name's Jack Board, Ciena's Climate change correspondent on this special edition of the climate conversations, I bring you stories of ecosystems at risk.
This week I traveled to Nepal to meet villages on the brink of dying out. This is Asia's great climate frontiers. The passage into Sam jong is a dramatic one. The mountainside settlement emerges through a deep canyon flanked by sculpted red mineral cliffs, snowcapped peaks in the distance encircled village situated just kilometers from the Nepal border with Tibet. This is land enriched by culture and myth, part of Upper Mustang. A place once known as the country's last
forbidden kingdom. Long isolated and still protected as a conservation area. It's a beautiful place. I can feel the freshness of the cool air, but the idyllic scene is not all that it seems in recent years, the longtime residents of this village have been heading for the exit, the small trickle of fresh water in a dusty riverbed. Nearby is a clue to what's happened here.
So too were the parched fields. The empty livestock circles and the houses with padlocks on their doors song is running dry and the families that have called at home for generations have become a new breed of climate migrants in the Himalayas for as long as locals can remember a distant glacier has fed a spring under the mountains. The annual melting of glaciers during warmer months is a normal process that sustains life in these remote areas,
but that natural tap has become irregular and unreliable. Many families have abandoned sam jong. Already nine remain though those left behind are overwhelmingly the elderly like bucky. A woman I met unwilling to uproot in their final years. Bucky has lived here basically her entire life. She explained to me what exactly was going on.
The water is getting less and less. We have so few fields that we can plant. Now look at our fields, they're all dry now the irrigation channel is also broken. We used to keep a lot of animals. The horses had their stables in the village, the cows used to graze all over the fields and now there are fewer and fewer animals. I'm 65 now. So you can tell how long I
have lived here. Others have moved because in the summers due to increasing rain, we have these flash floods coming down the cliffs and then the water sources also drying up also. The water is salty and so you can get belly problems when you drink it. Now our families are split between the two villagers in the summer. The kids come around, but my daughter and others are there and we're stuck here. It used to be nice. Were quite lonely. Now
bucky's daughter sang mo joined the exodus. She and her family live in a new village a day's walk from life here is different. The place is dusty, the fields are less productive winds whip up dust from the roads and long neglected fields. In the four years since the first re settlers arrived, the community has been working together to make the area
more viable for raising animals and planting crops. I can see the progress, but it's also clear that this town isn't a mountain paradise like their old place. Speaking to, I can sense the emotional lament about the physical distance between her and her mother now. But this was a matter of survival.
When we first had to leave, I was heartbroken and more so by the thought that our Children were going to have a tougher future somewhere new in this barren land. But now that we have started living here, it's not so bad. I keep worrying if my mother is ill or how she's doing and so I suggested she sell her goats and move here with us. But all the older people say that they want to keep living there.
The situation in Upper Mustang is the result of complex changes to the water systems in the Himalayas this year. Scientists reported that about 40% of the region's glacial mass has been lost since the little ice age, a period 400 to 700 years ago. The rate of melting in recent decades is up to 10 times faster than previously and the root cause is global warming at the same time. Climate change is triggering more extreme rain and snow events with potential cascading consequences including floods,
landslides and lake outbursts. Mahjong has repeatedly experienced flash flooding. Another one of the reasons many of its residents chose to leave worryingly, many of these shifts occurring in the Himalayas cannot be reversed soon as Miriam Jackson from the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development told me in Kathmandu, she's the program coordinator for the Cryo Sphere Initiative, which is studying climate impacts on high altitude areas
as the glaciers get smaller. First of all, there's more enough and then after that there's less runoff. But some glaciers, smaller glaciers have already reached the point where there's less runoff. So some communities are already seeing this, that the water is getting less and less and you can adapt it to a certain point, but after a while you can't adapt anymore. You know, even if we stop all the emissions were basically locked into a certain amount
of change. We have to try and slow things down. That's the main thing is to slow things down because we can't stop it. And at the same time, we have to look for ways to adapt to it that we know these changes are coming and going to increase, you know, to the end of the century at least,
experts say. If nations don't reduce global emissions moving communities will become more common at current rates. The Himalayas could lose two thirds of its glaciers by 2100. I spoke with dr region back to chaos to from Kathmandu University. I think the sifting of the whole villages gradually is the only one option. We can do some other options also like the rainwater harvesting, but that may not be enough for them and it
will be more costly Also. Yes, some people don't want to move from their original place, but first we have to survive only then we can go to the other like social sense, other religious cultures. First we have to survive for that we need water if no water. I think the shifting is the ultimate goal lighting in upper mustang too much water is also a threat. The evidence of a deadly flood is a daily site in the village of chaucer.
The riverbed here resembles a rocky moonscape entirely littered with thousands of white stones bounced down from mountains decades ago. I've never seen anything like it. This community was in the strike zone of a suspected glacial lake outburst floods or gloss off in the 1980s. After widespread damage, family relocations and a number of casualties, the fear still, lingers. Get up a local resident wandered out into the rockfall area to tell me about those scary days in the past.
The flood took away so many people, houses and livestock. It was such a tragedy. The flood brought all of this all this used to be fields before there were 32 families living in houses across the river. They all got swept away all the belongings along with people got taken away. Now you see all these rocks that the floods brought. So people live in fear because they have already been to deadly floods. There are fears
a third one might arrive. It's dangerous. While locals cannot be certain of the precise cause of such damaging events. Climate science spells out reasons for the instability in the earth and atmosphere in the Himalayas with abnormal annual melts due to global temperature rise, glaciers at high altitudes are feeding massive amounts of water into surrounding lakes. The risk of these lakes collapsing in a phenomenon called a cloth has communities throughout the region on edge.
Today, Nepal has 21 potentially dangerous glacial lakes high up in the mountains. They're difficult to monitor. I wanted to see one for myself with my nepali fixer, I take off on foot headed for a mysterious lake high up in the mist, we trek uphill on slippery rocks. Hour after hour, the altitude starting to heap the pressure on my skull and leaving me breathless. The cold is relentless. Every step becomes a struggle at 5400 m above sea level, about a similar altitude
to Mount Everest base camp. Finally, the aqua marine lake emerges. It's a moment of small triumph for me and the lake is beautiful in its fragility. It was probably the toughest physical challenge I've ever undertaken, what I take from it, how profound the impacts of climate change can be on places. People simply do not visit or think about
and what happens in parts of the Himalayas. We cannot see matters to more than a handful of small villages throughout south Asia, huge populations depend on glacial melt and river flow for their drinking water and irrigation. The risk of looming disasters is high, Pakistan, home to more than 7200 glaciers has been devastated
recently by extreme flooding, amplified by climate change. As early snowmelt combined with heavy seasonal rainfall in 2022 meltwater peak met the monsoon peak, a scenario that could easily repeat more frequently as weather patterns shift before I leave Nepal, I'm lucky enough to attend a special ceremony in a local family's home Across the Himalayas, ceremonies like this are a call to the gods of nature, locals pray for good weather ahead but the future is cloudy and further crises are expected,
meaning a return to the ways of the past is unlikely. This has been Jack Board, Thank you for listening to this special episode of the climate conversations. The team behind this podcast are Christina robert, Jacqueline chan, daniel lee, Joanne chan and Tiffany Young