Nepal Cabinet Holds Everest Meeting to Highlight Climate Change

Dec. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Nepal’s Cabinet meets at the Mount Everest base camp today to highlight how climate change is shrinking Himalayan glaciers and threatening rivers essential to agriculture and development in China, India and Pakistan.

Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal and more than 20 ministers, officials, journalists, and technicians reached Lukla in eastern Nepal yesterday and will travel by helicopter to Kalapatthar in the Everest foothills for the meeting, according to Nepalnews.com. The Cabinet intends to make a formal decision at the meeting on Nepal’s climate change policy and to endorse steps to protect the Himalayan environment.

The team will have its clothes, oxygen masks and medicines inspected before flying to the Kalapatthar plateau, 5,240 meters (17,192 feet) above sea level, Nepalnews.com reported. The meeting will last for about 20 minutes, it said.

Global warming, worsened by greenhouse-gas emissions, is melting glaciers from Switzerland to the Himalayas, threatening water and food security for 1.6 billion people in South Asia, according to an Asian Development Bank study. Half of the Alps’ glacial terrain has vanished since the 1850s, according to the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich.

The Himalayas are the source of India’s Ganges River; the Yangtze, China’s longest; Nepal’s main river, the Karnali; and Pakistan’s longest, the Indus. India and China possess more than 40 percent of Earth’s population and rely on rivers for drinking water and irrigation.

Nepal, lying between China and India, is home to Everest, the world’s tallest mountain, and eight of the world’s 14 peaks higher than 8,000 meters.

Maldives Threatened

The Maldives has also used its endangered geography ahead of United Nations-sponsored climate talks that begin Dec. 7 in Copenhagen to publicize the threat that heat-trapping pollution causes developing countries.

Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed and 11 ministers donned scuba gear to hold a meeting 4 meters under water last month in a lagoon, the British Broadcasting Corp. said.

The Maldives may be uninhabitable by the century’s end, scientists have said, based on forecasts of rising sea levels. Glaciers and ice sheets are melting in Antarctica and Greenland and ocean water occupies more volume the warmer it is.

Nepal’s prime minister is scheduled to speak at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen, Nepalnews.com said. The 11-day meeting, involving about 190 nations, aims to replace the Kyoto Protocol emissions targets that expire in 2012.

Talks have been at an impasse over the extent of curbs on carbon emissions from coal plants and factories and how much wealthier countries would provide in financial assistance to developing nations to cope with the impact of global warming.

China, the biggest greenhouse-gas emitter, offered last week to lower its CO2 output relative to the size of its economy while the U.S., the second-worst polluter, pledged to cut its carbon emissions by 2020.