Bhutan: Glacier melt is threat to sacred treasures

For centuries a monastic fortress in Bhutan’s Himalayas has sheltered ancient Buddhist relics and scriptures from earthquakes, fires and Tibetan invasions. Now the lamas here may have met their match – global warming.

At least 53 million cubic metres of glacier melt is threatening to break the banks of a lake upstream in the Himalayan peaks and provoke a “mountain tsunami” in Punakha valley. The government is pressing the lamas, so far unsuccessfully, to transport relics to a nearby hilltop for safekeeping. Massive flooding could inundate these valleys, which hold about a tenth of Bhutan’s population, by 2015.
“Pollution has disturbed our deities,” Leki Dorji, a red-robed lama, said in a courtyard as monks chanted mantras. “It’s for that that the rains have not come on time, that we have not had snow for five years.”

Bhutan, one of the earth’s greenest and most isolated countries and one of the few states that absorbs more carbon than it emits, faces the impact of a rise in global temperatures despite environmental policies lauded the world over.

It is not just about holy relics, but the livelihood of a nation dependent on Himalayan glacier-fed rivers which are also the life-blood for hundreds of millions of people downstream in the plains of south Asia.

“It has not been easy to conserve our ecological balance,” prime minister Jigmi Y Thinley told Reuters. “It has come at a cost. We could have been much richer, now we are as vulnerable and exposed as other countries.”

Irish Times