Editors Only Story
The Dust
Climate change is affecting the amount of snow accumulation in the watersheds, and because of this, residents of Sam Dzong chose not to plant their annual millet crop for the first time in decades as the water supply has become unreliable and there are advanced plans to abandon the village that has been occupied for the last 3000 years. Adding to the stress, the Nepali government and local councils have been improving the road between Pokhara, Nepal’s second largest city, and the Chinese border. With the road comes the promise of better education, health care and economic opportunity, which is proving hard for the younger residents to resist.
Understanding the environmental changes humanity is currently facing is complicated by factors that are more than changes in the weather, intersecting geopolitics or challenges to deeply embedded cultural norms. Any one alone will not trigger the changes we are observing in Upper Mustang and other communities around the world. What we are witnessing is the collision of these fronts that create gentle nudges to Perfect Storms that get people to take action. Changes in the physical environment triggered by climatic instabilities, tectonic upheavals or Anthropogenic changes can often go unnoticed, or are even appreciated depending on the preparedness of the exposed communities. However, changes in the more marginal places can trigger shifts that haven’t occurred there in millennia.
Nepal’s Upper Mustang province is exposed to three overlapping agents of change that have the potential to alter an enchanting, “Hidden Kingdom”, rarely visited except by traders and pilgrims traversing the mountains until the very last decade of the 20th century. While the climate has never been truly stable, the last century has seen changes that are unprecedented in the Earth’s history, and these changes are right now pushing already marginalised communities toward unsustainability.
Text by Professor Brian MacAdoo, Environmental Scientist and Geophysicist at Yale-NUS College, Singapore.
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