What do melting Himalayan glaciers have to do with the price of bread in a U.S. supermarket? More than you think, says Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute and a leading thinker on environmental sustainability.
Rising temperatures are melting glaciers at a quickening pace in the Himalayas and the adjacent Tibetan-Qinghai Plateau, which covers far northern India and western China. The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that many of these glaciers could disappear by 2035, reducing some great rivers to seasonal streams.
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| Photo courtesy of Earth Policy Institute. |
If this happens, Brown writes in his latest book, "Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization," water and grain supplies in India and China would shrink dramatically -- and social unrest and political instability would follow.
But that is not the whole story, Brown warns. Melting glaciers at the roof of the world could ultimately trickle down to grain and food prices in the United States.
Brown, 74, recently discussed what he sees as a looming food security crisis in an interview at his nonprofit Washington think tank. Excerpts follow.
Q: Please set the scene by describing the geography of the Himalayas and the adjacent Tibetan-Qinghai Plateau. Specifically, what major river basins do the glaciers feed?
A: The two major rivers of China, the Yellow and the Yangtze rivers, originate in the plateau. Both are fed by the ice melt from glaciers during the dry season and wind their way across China. The Yellow River reaches the sea south of Beijing. The Yangtze reaches the sea on the north side of Shanghai. The Yellow is important because it works its way across the northern part of China, an arid region with low rainfall. The Yangtze is important because 70 percent of China's rice harvest is from its basin, which is home to close to 400 million people.
India's Gangetic Basin, like the Yangtze Basin, has some 400 million people in it. The Ganges River is fed primarily by one glacier, which is the Gangotri Glacier. Some 70 percent of the river's flow during the dry season comes from the glacier's ice melt.
Q: How fast are these glaciers melting, and what factors do scientists attribute to the increasing rate of decline?
A: It's about the temperature. These glaciers are melting at an accelerating rate, and that's true for glaciers just about everywhere in the world. One of the things about this situation is that it's the most massive, predictable threat to food security we know. We have climate models that say rainfall is going to decrease here and temperatures are going to rise there, but these are comparative abstractions. They are models based on the information we have. This melting of glaciers is based on hard data that has been collected for a number of years. There is proof in photographs. The acceleration is real.
Q: As these glaciers melt, what will happen to the flow of water in the major rivers of China and India?
A: The great thing about glaciers is that they store water. I call them reservoirs in the sky -- and they've been there since agriculture began 11,000 years ago. We've come to take them for granted, but they may not be there a few decades from now when populations will be even larger than they are today.
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| The Tibetan-Qinghai Plateau (pictured) contains glaciers that feed China's Yellow and Yangtze rivers, and the Ganges River in India. Map courtesy of NASA. |
Chinese glaciologists say that by 2030, two-thirds of all of the glaciers in the country could be gone entirely. If they do, the Yellow River could become seasonal, flowing only during the rainy season and not at all during the dry season.
If the Gangotri disappears, the Ganges could also become a seasonal river. I can't imagine what life would be like there without that river. The river recharges aquifers along the way. If the Ganges ever stops flowing for a few months, it seems to me we're looking at chaos. We're looking at global food balance. China and India are the world's leading producers of wheat and rice. Together, they produce over half of the world's rice crop. What happens to these crops is of importance to every person in the world. We think of those glaciers as their glaciers, but they're also all of our glaciers. We're all part of an integrated food economy in the world.
Q: How are India and China adapting today to this massive glacial melt?
A: The interesting thing is that in the early stages of melting glaciers, there is more water flow. The glacier is still fairly large, and the flow rate is accelerating. This creates a false sense of food security, because you have plenty of water. But that doesn't last very long. Once the flow begins to diminish, it can go very fast.
The other important thing to note is that these glaciers are melting at a time when underground water resources are shrinking as a result of aquifer depletion. These two sources of water shortages are beginning to kick in during the same time period. I don't think the world is ready. One thing that farmers have to have is water, and they're already losing it to cities. ... We have already seen a reduction of China's wheat harvest, most of which is grown in the northern half of the country. Wheat production peaked at about 123 million tons in 1998. It's now down to about 105 million tons. A good part of that is the loss of irrigation water. Water tables are falling everywhere in the northern half of the country as a result of over-pumping.
The World Bank calculates that at least 175 million Indians, out of 1.1 billion people, are eating grain produced by over-pumping water from the ground. At some point, when the aquifer is depleted and the wells go dry, there will be many people with no grain. Prices will rise, and low-income people will grow hungrier and hungrier.
Q: What's "Plan B" for India and China getting the grains necessary to feed their populations?
A: There isn't one. That's what's so scary. About 80 percent of China's grain harvest comes from irrigated land. Sixty percent of India's grain harvest comes from irrigated land. Less than 20 percent of the United States' grain harvest comes from irrigated land.
Water tables have started falling everywhere in the world at more or less the same time because they're responding to the same forces -- the explosion of population and the rise of incomes during the latter half of the last century. World population has doubled, and water use has tripled. We're now pushing against the limits in much of the world.
Q: Given China's vast investments in the U.S. economy, would China be able to get the grain it needs from the Midwest?
A: Heaven help us. They've got a trillion dollars. If they wanted to bring this economy crashing down, all they would have to do is dump those dollars on the world market. They have an interest in this economy not crashing, obviously. But the reality is that they are our banker. And if our banker decides it wants to buy more of our grain, it's going to be difficult for us to say no.
Q: What's that have to do with the price of bread in a place like Houston?
A: If we have to share our grain harvest with 1.3 billion Chinese, it might not be fun.
There's only one world price of wheat. We export half of our wheat crop already. Our food prices will go up, but we'll be more buffered from the higher food prices than the people in India and China. They'll have to tighten their belts until there are no more notches left.
Q: You've said that this all comes down to climate change and energy choices. What could and should India and China do differently in terms of energy supply and demand?
A: The ironic thing about China and India is that the two countries whose food security will be most directly affected by rising temperatures and ice melting are India and China; they are also the two countries planning to build most of the coal-fired power plants. There needs to be a major investment in wind power, renewable energy. It makes no sense to build coal-fired power plants today. As NASA meteorologist Jim Hansen points out, we may be bulldozing them in a few years because we'll be so shocked by climate change. What we're talking about is the future of civilization itself. Civilization may not stand the stresses that we're going to be facing if we continue with business as usual.
Q: What about the United States? What must we do to persuade China and India to take a different energy path?
A: Change ourselves. Another way of looking at this is that we're in a race between tipping points -- natural and political. Can we phase out coal power plants fast enough to save the glaciers in the Himalayas and the Tibetan-Qinghai Plateau? The answer is, we don't know yet. But the pace of change in this country is fast. In the past year, Wall Street has basically turned its back on the coal industry. If this turns into a de-facto moratorium on coal-fired power plants here, that will get the attention of the rest of the world.
