KATHMANDU, Nepal -- Rain pummels the chaotic streets here. Cars, rickshaws and motorbikes pack the roads, swerving around the occasional cow. The unrelenting blare of honking that is the music of this city seems to amplify with every falling drop.
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| As farm production in Nepal declines, the men increasingly migrate to India for seasonal work. That leaves the women to take on hard labor to help feed their families. Photo courtesy of Oxfam. |
Dipak Khan looks outside his jewelry shop in Thamel, where vendors hawk yak wool blankets and wallets decorated with Buddha eyes. It is the first day of Dashain, the Hindu festival that marks the end of the long monsoon season. A group of tourists ducks under a doorway for cover from the downpour. Khan is worried.
"This is the global warming," Khan says with conviction. "The rains should not come this late. It hurts everything. The tourists do not want to walk around in this. It is very bad for business."
Climate change cannot be linked to any one weather event. But scientists, environmental activists and Nepalis themselves say the monsoon season so critical to agriculture is undoubtedly changing. Whether driven by cyclic changes, rising global temperatures or both, they say, the new patterns shaking up the June-through-September South Asian monsoon season are hurting crop yields and exacerbating already-existing problems of poverty and failed development.
The breathtaking Himalayas and the fate of their glaciers may capture the majority of climate change attention in Nepal. But activists point out that from the fertile plains to the overcrowded capital of Kathmandu, the landlocked country sandwiched between China and India faces widespread threats to crop production, livestock and water availability.
"When the issue of climate change comes here, people understand about the glaciers and the Himalayas. It is true that the Himalayas are melting, but when you come inside Nepal, you see the other impacts," said Manjeet Dhakal, director of Clean Energy Nepal.
Farmers in the plains are seeing more sedimentation and land erosion, higher river flooding and even unusual blossoming times of the rhododendron, Nepal's national flower. Just a few years ago, winter droughts and a delayed summer monsoon left agricultural land uncultivated. Oxfam called the 2008-2009 drought one of the worst on record, with 3.4 million people estimated to need food assistance.
This year, Nepal is seeing the highest rate of rainfall in 30 years.
"The monsoon is so unreliable, and the farmers who depend on it for agriculture are getting the brunt," said Shubash Lohani, deputy director of WWF's Eastern Himalaya program. Because the country's irrigation system is not well developed, he said, people rely almost completely on rainfall for 80 percent of the country's agricultural needs.
In Kathmandu, meanwhile, water demand is exploding. The population rate has tripled in the past 20 years to about 4 million people. Most of the city's drinking water comes from the Bagmati River system, but officials say it is poorly managed -- used as a dumping site in some areas -- and can only meet half the city's demand.
"Kathmandu in particular is expanding very rapidly. The whole water balance is being screwed up, and that is fundamental. Now, on top of that, with climate change we are going to have erratic rain patterns," said Bhushan Tuladhar, coordinator of Climate Change Network Nepal and a technical adviser on water for U.N. Habitat Nepal.
Since 2007, the Nepal government has worked hard to develop a strong presence at the U.N. climate talks and to build awareness inside the country of the threats. Recently, the prime minister developed a climate change council aimed at integrating knowledge about the impacts of rising global temperatures with local planning.
Yet in places like Kathmandu, according to Tuladhar, that's a serious challenge. Plans are currently under way to divert water to Kathmandu through a 28-kilometer tunnel from the Melamchi River in a neighboring valley. The Melamchi is a tributary of the larger Indravati River basin, fed in part by the Himalayan glaciers.
"If the glaciers are melting very fast, when we dig that tunnel, Melamchi may not have as much water as we thought," Tuladhar said, adding that he hopes a growing understanding of climate change in Nepal will somehow provide an opportunity for policymakers to develop better water planning methods.
"It highlights a lot of issues that we should be taking care of anyway," he said.
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KATHMANDU, Nepal -- Cigarette packs, candy wrappers, plastic water bottles and the occasional shoe litter the narrow streets here and clog the gutters. Sanu Kaji Shrestha looks around and sees gems.
From a shed in a quiet courtyard a few hundred yards from the chaos of the city streets, Shrestha tries to turn Kathmandu garbage into its energy future. Everything from seaweed to sawdust makes its way into his Foundation for Sustainable Technologies, coming out the other end a "briquette" of low-smoke, long-burning fuel that he believes could change the lives of the poor in Nepal and elsewhere.
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| The recycler: Sanu Kaji Shrestha holds a fuel "briquette" made from pulped, compressed garbage. Photo by Lisa Friedman. |
"Every bit of grass has energy," he proclaims with a broad smile, showing off the fuel bricks he has made from dried leaves, kitchen scraps and even date pits from the Middle East. "I just make energy from the waste material that we produce."
About 3 billion people across the globe cook by burning biomass like wood, crude coal or animal dung. The World Health Organization estimates that toxic smoke from such unsafe cookstoves is responsible for nearly 2 million premature deaths every year, and contributes to everything from low birth weight to respiratory infections.
Groups like the U.N. Foundation have sought to change that trend. Through the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, the U.N. Foundation, along with the Clinton Global Initiative and others, is working to see 100 million homes in developing countries adopt cleaner cooking alternatives by 2020.
Yet in Nepal, where only 10 percent of households are connected to the power grid, Shrestha said, convincing people to change their way of cooking is no easy feat.
Shreshtha was a part-time inventor even before he retired from the World Bank in 2001. His first creation was a small solar cooker. Having seen one at an exhibition, he decided in 1995 to make his own after one of Kathmandu's kerosene shortages.
His wife, however, would have nothing to do with it.
"Solar cooking habit is not the Nepali habit. It's very difficult to cook dal bhat," he said, referring to the lentil and rice dish that is a staple of nearly every Nepali meal.
"I had to cook it for her myself to convince her it would taste the same," Shrestha said. He did the same for his neighbors. "That is the main thing, not changing the food habit."
A few years later, the idea for fuel briquettes was born when Kathmandu's drains became blocked in a major flood. The culprit: wet cardboard boxes clogging the pipes. Shrestha took some, mashed them into a pulp and molded it with a tin can.
"This is my diamond," he said, holding up that first lump of grayish-brown hardened pulp. Since then, he has worked constantly to refine the briquettes, mashing them first with a lever press that required three people before coming up with a device that a single person could operate. The goal, he said, is to develop a process that people, particularly people in poor and rural areas, can do easily on their own. Then he serves a glass of sweet tea, cooked over a small briquette fire.
As with solar cookstoves, he said, convincing the public to use cleaner-burning and longer-lasting waste fuel will take time despite the benefits. But, he said, "Once we show people food will take less time and taste as good, then they will accept it."
Though his work has been recognized by the Nepal Academy of Science and Technology, the British Council and U.S. EPA, Shrestha's foundation receives little outside funding beyond support from some Rotary clubs in the United States. With that, though, he has traveled from Cambodia to Afghanistan to train villages on ways to segregate waste and use it wisely. He wants to see the movement spread.
Said Shrestha, "People used to say, 'Water for all.' That was the global vision. I say, 'Why not fuel for all?' We have the full resources."
