Tibetans at UN climate conference demand action on Tibetan Plateau

Copenhagen: A delegation of Tibetans is for the first time attending the UN’s climate-change negotiations.
The Tibetans have come to Copenhagen in order to present new information about how China’s environmental policies on the Tibetan Plateau are worsening an already dire climate-change crisis there. These policies are also creating human-rights crises, in Tibet now and for possibly more than a billion people downstream in south and southeast Asia.
Tibet, the world’s largest and highest plateau, is known as the Earth’s third pole because it has more freshwater, stored as glacial ice, than any other region on Earth except the North and South poles. The Tibetan Plateau is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world; the vast majority of its 40,000 glaciers are melting, fundamentally altering the water supplies of Asia’s great rivers that begin on the Tibetan plateau and which are the lifeline for more than a billion people in ten downstream countries.
China is implementing a policy of uprooting and displacing the more than two million Tibetan nomads from their traditional homes on the vast grasslands of the plateau. This policy, being carried out under the guise of plateau-wide conservation, is linked to a second strategy of damming and diverting Tibet’s rivers, moving water away from the rest of Asia in an attempt to solve China’s own water crisis.
Experts present at the press briefing will present new findings on the significance of Tibet as the third pole to Asia and the rest of the world, and will discuss how Tibetans’ knowledge of their land represents the best chance of conserving the fragile high-altitude ecosystem that is of vital importance not only to Tibetans but also to China and the rest of the world.
“Left unchecked, China’s policies on the Tibetan Plateau are laying the groundwork for a climate crisis as large and consequential as sea-level rise and melting polar ice sheets,” said Tenzin Dhardon Sharling, with Tibetan Women’s Association. That’s why Tibetans have come to this conference. Our solutions include Tibetans being involved in all phases of assessment, decision-making and management of the plateau’s ecosystems. This includes the need for an independent, international scientific assessment of Tibet’s ecosystem and current land-use policies. Participation of all relevant stakeholders – from Tibetan nomads to communities and scientists in downstream nations that depend on Tibet’s water – is essential given the scale of the threat before us.”

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