Himalayan climate change alerts Bhutan

Agence France-Presse. Thimphu

Bhutan Prime Minister has a grim warning about the effects of climate change say the Himalayas, that it the small Kingdom of ambitious plans to a world leader in the use of water power could wreck.

Between India and China isolated, mountainous nation is famous for "Happiness" for its citizens instead of Orthodox economic growth, to pursue environmental protection for its development model.

Bhutan, 700,000 people, is already a carbon neutral electricity producers, with almost all its power plants, energy from the overlapping streams criss-cross of its spectacular landscape.

But the Prime Minister, Jigmi Thinley, said that the country was powerless against the changes by shifting weather patterns threaten regional water supply and planning, the energy of melting of Himalayan Snow.

' The glaciers are very fast retreat, some even disappear. The flow of water in our system is very worrying, "he said in an interview in his Office in the capital Thimphu." use fluctuating

' In the summer they their banks in a way that will never happen that in the past and in winter the last straw, they shrink and almost dry up.

"The climate change, global warming is real and the impact on our hydrology is very difficult."

The meltwater caused by warmer summer also to the creation of lakes, which led high in the mountains, to threaten the people in the valleys below.

The Government builds early warning system to alert authorities to potential breaches of the natural dams that hold back the water.

1994 Lake Lugge in the Northern Bhutan burst and killed 21 people.

A team of 200 to 300 workers and engineers in the same area, the largest glacier lake in the country are currently working to reduce district Thorthormi Lunana.

Workers, one during the summer months, when it is possible to work in the field of icy and inhospitable, digging drainage canal, which reduced the lake level from five metres.

The equipment for the task had, with the air too thin with helicopters carried out. To obtain on the spot on foot had to pass everyone a 5,000-meter peak.

"It Spades and shovels, is literally," said the Secretary of the gross national happiness Commission, a governmental agency, the vets Karma Tshiteem, and suggests the policy reviewed the work recently.

"This is that climate change is not some theoretical thing, still discusses a strong example,." We are opposite and mitigation efforts, have to do ' in an interview, he told AFP.

The shift can endanger ambitious hydroelectric power plans to capacity from a current high of about 1,500 megawatts for four plants, 10,000 seven-part MW by adding an another 10 projects by 2020.

Through the sale of electricity energy-starved neighbors India, hoped the aid-dependent country economically until 2018 self-sufficiency.

But Thinley said the Government had to rethink that a limitless source of energy and income would be rivers the adoption. The total for hydropower in Bhutan is estimated at 30,000 had MW.

"Water power not the kind of exponential source, the we it as it can,", he said.

"The River in the winter and summer used to, the change was not so much." Now it is so much so that in winter, we import electricity from India. "

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| Source: newagebd.com