By IANS – 27 October 2021
To adapt to the effects of climate change impacting the Tibetan Plateau—the world’s ‘third pole’—a group of Tibetans will explain its role in the global climate system and why it should be part of the conversation at the upcoming two-week United Nations conference, COP26, in Glasgow in Britain.
Advocacy group International Campaign for Tibet says the COP26 will be an important chance to tell policymakers why the plateau needs to be part of the global talks.
Its interdisciplinary panel on the sidelines of the COP26 will discuss the lessons Tibet offers for designing inclusive and sustainable global climate policies, and provide practical recommendations for the next steps.
Just ahead of the COP26, slated to meet between October 31 and November 12, globetrotting Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, is issuing a video message on October 29, urging the climate scientists, state heads and business leaders for the urgent need for climate action to save Mother Nature.
The Tibetan Plateau is close to two per cent of the planet’s land surface, the size of Western Europe, and with as much global importance as other comparable geographies, perhaps more since the elevation of the plateau has a global impact on jetstream, monsoon dynamics, and the water cycle of the entire northern hemisphere.
Another advocacy Tibetan Centre of Human Rights and Democracy says Tibet experiences rapid climate change that damages glaciers, cause floods and lake overtopping, melts permafrost, compromises livelihoods, and dries wetlands essential to the East Asian flyway routes of seasonally migrating birds, threatening extinction.
“Warmer and wetter makes Tibet more like China, which is good from China’s point of view,” it says in a statement. Read more here.