Dalai Lama bemoans deforestation of Tibet

Yahoo News 21 Nov 07;

The Dalai Lama called Wednesday for special care to preserve Tibet's ecosystem, saying that corruption among Chinese bureaucrats was worsening deforestation.

Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, who is on a visit to Japan, said that as the Tibetan plateau was high in altitude and dry, "once you damage the environment, it will take a long period to recover".

"Therefore, we need special care," the Dalai Lama said.

Because major rivers originating in Tibet feed into South Asia, "special care of the Tibetan ecology is not only the concerns for six million Tibetans, but also the concerns for millions of people," he said.

But some people from China "have no knowledge of ecology. They are only concerned about industries (with) no idea of ecological consequences," he said.

The Chinese government has begun to impose "some restrictions on deforestation in some parts of Tibet. However, unfortunately now in China, sometimes restrictions can be easily ignored through pocket money, corruption," he said.

"Some Chinese businessmen still can carry out deforestation and also they exploit natural resources with poor care for the ecology," he said.

The comments came as China's state Xinhua news agency said climate change was causing more weather-related disasters than ever in Tibet.

China's director of the Tibet Regional Meteorological Bureau, Song Shanyun, was quoted as saying "natural disasters, like droughts, landslides, snowstorms and fires are more frequent and calamitous now" in Tibet and "the tolls are more severe and losses are bigger".

Climate change a growing threat in Tibet, media report
Yahoo News 20 Nov 07

Climate change is causing more weather-related disasters than ever in the Himalayan region of Tibet, where the temperature is rising faster than the rest of China, state press reported Wednesday.

"Natural disasters, like droughts, landslides, snowstorms and fires are more frequent and calamitous now," Xinhua news agency quoted the director of the Tibet Regional Meteorological Bureau, Song Shanyun, as saying.

"The tolls are more severe and losses are bigger."

The temperature in Tibet has been rising by 0.3 degrees Celsius (0.54 degrees Fahrenheit) every decade, about 10 times faster than the national average, with visible consequences, a bureau study found.

"Problems like receding snow lines, shrinking glaciers, drying grasslands and desert expansion are increasingly threatening the natural eco-system in the region," Song said.

The report is the latest in China to warn of the dramatic impact of global warming on the region known as the "roof of the world" and regarded as a barometer of world climate conditions.

The region's glaciers have been melting at an average rate of 131.4 square kilometres (50 square miles) per year over the past 30 years, according to previously released Chinese government research.

Chinese researchers have said that even if global warming did not worsen, the region's glaciers would be reduced by nearly a third by 2050 and up to half by 2090, at the current rate.

Song directly attributed two disasters in 2000 to climate change.

In one of them, a thawed snow cap caused a "rare and extremely large-scale" landslide in Nyingchi prefecture in southeast Tibet.

More than 300 million cubic metres (10.6 billion cubic feet) of debris, piling up to 100 metres (330 feet) high, blocked a river and impacted 4,000 people in the area, the report said.

The other disaster was in Shigatse in southern Tibet, when a "once-in-a-century" flood affected more than 60,000 people and inundated thousands of hectares of cropland.