ae.09 Climate change and the Himalaya

Content

Statement of inquiry
- Scientific and technical innovators need to understand how power affects the processes that occur within systems.
Factual questions [Remembering facts and topics]
- What is the impact of climate change upon alpine glaciers focused upon the Hindu Kush Himalayan region and the associated river basins.
Aims of this lesson
- To examine the impact of climate change upon alpine glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region.
- To examine the likely impacts of receding alpine glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region upon the associated river basins and the populations that live within them.

Base knowledge and understanding

Video clip

[29 May 2020]

Visualization

Visualizing Earth’s Global Ice Loss Between 1994-2017 — [Source]

News article

National Geographic - A water crisis looms for 270 million people as South Asia’s glaciers shrink [16 June 2020]

Context

Climate change in the Himalayas

[5 February 2019]

[7 February 2019]

[20 June 2019]

Task

The end-point will be the additional to your (on-going) notes document of figures 1 to 5 (below) with a short paragraph of text (for each figure) that gives the figure context.

Your short paragraph should try and answer the following →

Describe what the figure shows - remembering to use 'Oh so easy' → something obvious, something specific and something odd.
Outline the link(s) between what the figure shows and the impacts of climate change upon alpine glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region.
Explain the link(s) between climate change, the impacts of climate change upon alpine glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region and the population that live in the related drainage basins.

The sources of information you will need to use are below. Start at the top of the list and work through at least the first two sources.

The Guardian - A third of Himalayan ice cap doomed, finds report [4 February 2019]

National Geographic - A water crisis looms for 270 million people as South Asia’s glaciers shrink [16 June 2020]

The Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment [2019]

Figure 1 - The Hindu Kush Himalayan region and 10 major river basins. [Source]

Figure 2 - Major river basins originating in the Hindu Kush Himalaya. [Source]

Figure 3 - The grid-averaged trends of annual mean temperature in the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) since 1901. The values on the top right corner are the number of grid boxes; white grid boxes indicate the missing data. [Source]

Figure 4 - Glacier area change rates (%/yr) for different regions in the extended HKH. Pre-2000 and post-2000 means are given by the colour in the left and right half-circles, respectively, together with the number of studies available for each period. Circle diameter is scaled to the current glacierized area in each region. A histogram of all observed change rates is given in the upper right. [Source]

Figure 5 - Total hydropower potential and developed hydropower as a percentage of total by country. [Source]