In the 30-mile long Zanskar Valley in the Himalayas of northwestern India, the warming climate has lengthened the growing season, giving farmers in the village of Stongde a welcome additional month before the killing frost that heralds alpine winter. “But in Kumik, a slightly smaller village two miles away, farmers have watched in despair as their water supplies slowed to a trickle and then dried up altogether. As a result, they’re being forced to relocate,” writes Daniel Grossman in Yale e360. Like the other villages in the valley, Stongde and Kumik get their water from glaciers in the mountains above them. The glacier above Kumik shrank by 30 percent in a few years and no longer drains into the village.
About 400 million people around the world rely on mountain glaciers for a portion of the water they drink and use for agriculture, says Grossman in a story produced in partnership with FERN, the Ag Insider’s publisher. “But with few exceptions, rising temperature are shrinking ice on every glaciated range on earth.” Global warming often is presented as a two-edged sword, writes Grossman, with winners and losers. In the Zansker Valley, even the winners worry how long their water will flow.
A video to accompany the story is available here.