Nearly a billion people who depend on the Indus, Ganga and Brahmaputra river basins for life and livelihood are threatened by the impact of global warming in the Himalaya-Karakoram mountains. Melting snow and glaciers will swell the rivers, but changed seasonality will affect farming, other livelihoods and the hydropower sector, while causing floods downstream, a new multinational study by researchers in Indore, Roorkee, Delhi, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad and Nepal, among others, has found.
In India, the Union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, the states of Himachal Pradesh and Punjab and parts of northern Haryana and Rajasthan lie within the Indus River basin. Uttarakhand, Delhi, the rest of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal and large parts of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh lie in the Ganga basin. Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh, and most of Assam, Meghalaya and Nagaland lie within the Brahmaputra basin. The affected persons, including in the megacities of Delhi, Lahore, Karachi, Kolkata and Dhaka, amount to nearly 13% of the global population in 2021, or one in eight people.