By Sudeshna Sarkar,
Kathmandu, July 10 (IANS) Environment activists across the world are fuming after a world body ignored pleas for urgent action to protect some of the globes finest sites, including the Mt Everest, from climate change.
As the World Heritage Committee, comprising 21 countries as diverse as the US, Cuba, India and Madagascar, began its 30th meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania, Sunday, 37 nations and four individuals asked for urgent action to save Mount Everest on the Nepal-Tibet border, the Andes mountains in Peru, the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park in the US and Canada and the Great Barrier and Belize Barrier (coral) Reefs.
The plea was reinforced with Unesco's World Heritage Centre Sunday publishing a survey of 83 countries that warned "125 World Heritage Sites were threatened by climate change", including 19 glacier sites and seven coral reefs worldwide.
Pro Public Nepal, a Kathmandu-based INGO campaigning to put Mt Everest and the Sagarmatha National Park on its slope in the Unesco list of 'In Danger" heritage sites for urgent intervention, says increasing temperature in the Himalayan regions is making the glaciers melt and could lead to the bursting of glacial lakes.
Prakash Mani Sharma, who is representing the INGO at the weeklong meet in Vilnius, says the Himalayas have warmed about 1 degree Celsius since the 1970s, almost twice the global average, affecting the snowy peaks and hundreds of glaciers and glacial lakes in the region.
"The warming has led to the retreat of 67 percent of Himalayan glaciers, and an official study has identified several lakes as potentially at risk of outburst flood," Sharma says.
"Continued melt will increase summer river flows for a few decades, with expected increased frequency of floods, followed by a severe reduction in flow to major rivers such as the Ganges and Indus as the glaciers disappear."
Along with Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth International, the Climate Justice Programme and other campaigners, Pro Public is urging the meet to send a mission of observers to the five seriously endangered World Heritage sites to evaluate the nature and extent of the threat and propose measures to mitigate the threat.
They are also asking for the countries that have signed the World Heritage Convention to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions as part of their duty to protect the sites.
However, the campaigners say the World Heritage Committee is "anxious to accommodate the US and Canadian governments' well known climate change positions" and have accordingly, endorsed a world heritage and climate change strategy focusing on the impacts but not the causes of the problem.
Peter Roderick, co-director of the Climate Justice Programme, says: "We are extremely angry that the World Heritage Committee has not taken any meaningful action to protect some of the most important sites on Earth from climate change. They are good at drawing up wonderfully drafted documents, but the idea of actually doing anything seems to pose a problem."
Sir Edmund Hillary, one of the most respected voices in the world today and the first man to summit Mt Everest in 1956 with Tenzing Norgay Sherpa, backs the petition to put Mt Everest on the Unseco's endangered sites' list.
