The Himalayas are melting faster - and India's economy is 'at risk' — SkimNews
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- Systemiq's report found Himalayan glaciers are losing mass 65% faster than a decade ago, with only about 21 of an estimated 40,000 glaciers in the Himalaya-Karakoram region being monitored in detail and on a sustained basis.
- India's government told parliament in July that 56 glacial lakes have been classified "very high risk" following a 2025 scientific assessment of 189 high-risk lakes; the Central Water Commission is monitoring 2,485 glacial lakes larger than 10 hectares across India's Himalayan river basins.
- Himalayan water underpins roughly 20% of India's GDP — sustaining wheat, rice, tea, hydropower and pilgrimage economies — yet the mountain states capture only about 5% of that value, the report says.
- Black carbon from brick kilns in the Indian plains drives roughly a third of Himalayan glacier melt, a domestic pollution lever that India and its neighbours can act on directly, unlike global greenhouse-gas emissions.
- The 2023 Sikkim glacial lake outburst flood killed at least 70 people and damaged roads, bridges and hydropower projects; a similar 2021 Uttarakhand disaster killed more than 200 after floods swept through the Rishiganga and Dhauliganga valleys.
- Lord Nicholas Stern, chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, warned the Himalayan ecological system is "approaching a tipping point," with "hundreds of millions of people living beneath it."
Why it matters: The numbers expose a stark asymmetry: India's mountain states generate the water and bear the risk for roughly 20% of national GDP, yet capture only about 5% of that value — making local resilience investment an economic imperative, not just an environmental one. Crucially, roughly a third of glacier melt is driven by black carbon from brick kilns, a pollutant India's regulators can curb without waiting on global climate talks.
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