Water supplies in the major Asian rivers, including the Brahmaputra and the Indus, may increase in the coming decades, a new study has found, dispelling fears of climate experts that water flow in these rivers would drastically decline in future.
"This is good news because social and economic development in the surrounding areas, including China, India, Nepal and other countries in Southeast Asia, are closely tied to climate change and access to water," said Deliang Chen, a professor in the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
A report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 2007 suggested that the glaciers in the Himalayas will be gone by 2035, the researchers said.
"This mistaken claim and the subsequent debate pointed to a need for a better understanding of the dynamics of climate, glaciers and future water supplies in the region," said Chen.
Since the statement by IPCC in 2007, the Tibetan Plateau has been a focus of international environmental research.
The research group led by Chen, in collaboration with researchers from the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has studied future climate change and its effect on the water balance in the region.
The great Asian rivers have their source on the Plateau or in the neighbouring mountains.
The study modelled the water flows upstream in the Yellow River, the Yangtze, the Mekong, the Salween, the Brahmaputra and the Indus. The studies include both data from past decades and simulations for future decades.
The results show that water flows in the rivers in the coming decades would either be stable or would increase compared to the period from 1971-2000.
The Tibetan Plateau is the highest and most extensive area of high land in the world, and what happens there affects water resources for almost a third of the world's population, the researchers said.
The study was published in the journal Global and Planetary Change.
