South Asia risks water insecurity as global warming affects Himalayas

Warming-induced changes in the Himalaya-Karakoram region will impact water availability in the Indus, Ganga and Brahmaputra basins.

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