KATHMANDU: School teacher Sherbahadur Tamang walks through the southern Nepalese village of Khetbari and describes what happened on September 9.
"During the night there was light rain but when we woke, its intensity increased. In an hour or so, the rain became so heavy that we could not see more than a foot or two in front of us. It was like a wall of water and it sounded like 10,000 lorries. It went on like that until midday. Then all the land started moving like a river."
When it stopped raining Tamang and the villagers barely recognized their valley in the Chitwan hills.
In just six hours the Jugedi River, which normally flows for only a few months of the year and is at most about 50 metres wide in Khetbari, had scoured a 300 metre-wide path down the valley, leaving a 3-metre-deep rockscape of giant boulders, trees and rubble in its path.
Hundreds of fields and terraces had been swept away. The irrigation systems built by generations of farmers had gone and houses were demolished or were now uninhabitable. Tamang's house was left on a newly formed island.
Khetbari expects a small flood every decade or so, but what shocked the village was that the two largest have taken place in the last three years.
According to Tamang, a pattern is emerging. "The floods are coming more severely and more frequently. Not only is the rainfall far heavier these days than anyone has ever experienced, it is also coming at different times of the year."
Nepal is on the front line of climate change and variations on Khetbari's experience are now being recorded in communities from the freezing Himalayas of the north to the hot lowland plains of the south. For some people the changes are catastrophic.
"The rains are increasingly unpredictable. We always used to have a little rain each month, but now when there is rain it's very different. It's more concentrated and intense. It means that crop yields are going down," said Tekmadur Majsi, whose lands have been progressively washed away by the Tirshuli River.
He now lives with 200 other environmental change refugees in tents in a small grove of trees by a highway. In the south villagers are full of minute observations of a changing climate.
One notes that wild pigs in the forest now have their young earlier, another that certain types of rice and cucumber will no longer grow where they used to, a third that the days are hotter and that some trees now flower twice a year.
Anecdotal observations are backed by scientists, who are recording in Nepal some of the fastest long-term increases in temperatures and rainfall anywhere in the world.
At least 44 of Nepal's and neighbouring Bhutan's Himalayan lakes, which collect glacier meltwater, are said by the UN to be growing so rapidly that they could burst their banks within a decade.
Any climate change in Nepal is reflected throughout the region. Nearly 400 million people in northern India and Bangladesh also depend on rainfall and rivers that rise there.
"Unless the country learns to adapt then people will suffer greatly," said Gehendra Gurung, a team leader with Practical Action in Nepal, which is trying to help people prepare for change.
In projects around the country the organization is working with vulnerable villages, helping them build dykes and set up early warning systems. It is also teaching people to grow new crops, introducing drip irrigation and water storage schemes, trying to minimize deforestation which can lead to landslides and introducing renewable energy.
(China Daily 12/05/2006 page14)
