Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-09-26-Speech-1-198-000"
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"en.20110926.22.1-198-000"2
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".
Madam President, quite rightly we debated for the last half an hour or so the causes and prevention of unnecessary deaths on European roads. My report on dam infrastructures in developing countries is geared to the same subject: preventing unnecessary deaths from floods that are caused by glacier retreats in the Hindu Kush Himalayan range and also in Latin America.
Flying in a helicopter at 18 000 feet at the top of the Himalayas and at the Everest base camp, I saw beautiful water-bound lakes below me. They were the most dangerous things I have seen for a long time. I then met with ICIMOD, the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, which has identified 8 000 glacial lakes in the Hindu Kush Himalayas alone, 203 of which they have declared to be extremely dangerous.
Two weeks ago Nepal experienced an earthquake, not reported in Europe but certainly reported in Asia, where many people died. This earthquake measured 9.69 on the Richter scale. Thank goodness those dams did not break.
The reason why these glacial lakes are being created and why natural glacial lakes with natural moraines, as they call them, are being created is that the glaciers are melting faster at certain periods in the year. The water from these glaciers normally feeds the greatest rivers in the world – the Ganges, the Yellow River, the Brahmaputra, the Darya – and they feed billions of people. In fact, 1.3 billion people eat rice and grow wheat on the river banks of these greatest agricultural assets in the world.
However, because of accelerated glacier melting and the natural accumulation of water in these 8 000 glacial lakes, they are bursting and flash flooding, and we now have periods of enormous floods, as we experienced recently in Pakistan when 20 million people – 20 million people! – were made homeless and many thousands of people starved. 500 000 people had to be fed emergency food and the wheat crop was destroyed for whole periods of years.
Again the floods returned to Pakistan this July and, as we speak, there are vast areas of Pakistan inundated with water; parts of India are inundated with water. The routine, managed drawdown of water on these great rivers of the Ganges, on the Himalayan range, is no longer predictable. Water is accumulating in the oddest places; I have seen it.
Now it is impossible, I think, for us to repair these moraines because they are naturally formed, but we can control the outlet of water by alternative mitigation methods, siphons and the construction of open channels and tunnels in order to lower the water level in the glacial lakes, and by controlling the water flow into the local river system to use the water as a reservoir for use.
There is much work to be done and I call for an international agency of the United Nations to be created, through the EU’s support, so that India, Pakistan, China, Nepal, Bhutan and other countries can come together under the auspices of the UN."@en1
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