Global water crisis: Seen from the first Himalayan glacial trickle

In the Nepalese Himalayas in 2009, I trekked into the Langtang Valley, just short of the Tibetan border, and to a village of empty plywood cabins. The arrival of the summer monsoon season had chased the trekkers away.

Just uphill was a Buddhist temple and, behind it, a wrinkled sea of gray ice reached up the steep mountain walls into the clouds – the Langtang Lirung glacier, one of thousands that make up the largest body of ice outside the poles. In the winter, these glaciers capture precipitation that melts off in warmer months to feed the Ganges, Indus, and Brahmaputra rivers – and 1.5 billion people in eight countries who depend on them.

At night I could hear the thunderous crackling of distant avalanches on peaks above. By day, I saw shepherds, whose yaks couldn't withstand the summer heat, chanting a prayer for safe passage to higher, cooler climes.

The monsoon, seasonal rain that sweeps across the Indian subcontinent before crashing into the world's tallest mountains, was late, causing the worst drought in 30 years in Mumbai (Bombay), a thousand miles south.

Villagers talked of the arrival of mosquitoes – heralds of warmer summers and milder winters. The accelerated glacial melt is expected to increase floods in countries downstream over coming decades; earlier melts can reduce water when it's needed most.

In the long run, says Madhav Karki, director of the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, the rivers themselves may become seasonal, with potentially profound effects on the countries below.

Water is power

My travels in South Asia were a reminder of an ancient truth, often lost at the magical turn of a tap: A society's fate turns on its water supply. Water is power.

Covering global water issues, I've seen up close how the gap between the water rich and the water poor is often the line between life and death. In Haiti, I met people who took their water from rivers or nearby wells. Since the outbreak of cholera, those very water sources threaten their lives.

In Bangladesh, I saw how too much water creates problems: More intense rain deluges, that one scientist with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change told me might already reflect climate change, had increased flooding and river erosion. I met people whose homes, crops, and water supplies were repeatedly wiped out. In a country with a population roughly half that of the United States packed into an area about the size of Idaho, they had few options but to move to low-lying, vulnerable coastal lands. Or they joined the nearly 1 billion slum dwellers worldwide trying to ascend the economic ladder and increasing demand for water in all its forms.

Water: source of life and conflict

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