Melting glaciers will trigger food shortages

The irrigation water vital for the grain crops that feed China and India is at risk of drying up, as global warming melts the glaciers that feed Asia’s biggest rivers.

“The world has never faced such a predictably massive threat to food production as that posed by the melting mountain glaciers of Asia,” says Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute.

The Ganges, Yellow and Yangtze Rivers in India and China are fed by rains during the monsoon season, but during the dry season they depend heavily on meltwater from glaciers in the Himalayas. The Gangotri Glacier in the Himalayas alone supplies 70% of the flow of the Ganges in the dry season.

The dry season is precisely when water is needed most to irrigate the rice and wheat crops on which hundreds of millions of people depend for their staple calories. But the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported last year that many Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035. According to Brown, Chinese glaciologists now estimate that two-thirds of the glaciers on the Tibet-Qinghai Plateau could be gone by 2060.

New Scientist