Asian Water Tower’ Drying Up, 2 Billion People at Risk

BEIJING, (IANS) – Rapid global warming has worsened the water imbalance for almost 2 billion people in the Third Pole region — including India, Bangladesh, and Nepal — where about 90 percent of water is used for irrigation, a new study has warned.

This will lead to greater water demand in densely populated downstream countries, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment.

The Third Pole, which includes the Tibetan Plateau and the surrounding Hindu Kush Himalayan Mountain ranges, is known as the “Asian water tower”.

With the largest global store of frozen water after the Antarctic and Arctic, the Third Pole region, located in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, is home to headwaters of over 10 major Asian rivers.

The rise in temperatures with changes in the westerlies and the Indian monsoon led to glacier retreat and more precipitation in the region’s northern part and less in the southern.

The spatial imbalance will alleviate water scarcity in the Yellow and Yangtze River basins while increasing scarcity in the further-south Indus basins, the study said.

The highest water demand is projected to be in the Indus basin, said Walter Immerzeel, co-author of the study and a researcher at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

He stressed that this demand would affect irrigation, accounting for more than 90 percent of water use across the area.

Since this north-south disparity is expected to be amplified by climate warming in the future, adaptation policies for sustainable water resource management are greatly needed in downstream countries.

The scientists said they still need more information to help the public respond to the changes, such as comprehensive monitoring stations in data-scarce areas.

They also call for collaboration between upstream and downstream countries.