Global warming is not the same for everyone. Or rather, it doesn’t affect everyone in the same way: there are regions of the globe that suffer it more and others that are still “holding up”. One of the greatest disparities from this point of view is that between mountain areas and lowland areas: the former are much more subject to the effects of climate change, which are actually accelerating in recent decades.
This is what a study published on explains Nature Reviews Earth & Environmentwhich warns that these differences between plains and mountains put the lives of billions of people at risk, especially in China and India.
The mountains are sick. The study is the most comprehensive analysis ever published of the EDCC phenomenon, elevation-dependent climate changei.e. climate change that depends on altitude: aggregates data on a global scale relating to temperature and precipitation (rain and snow) over a period of forty years, between 1980 and 2020, with further insights into four case studies, namely the Rocky Mountains, the Andes, the Tibetan Plateau and the Alps.
Alarming results. As for temperature, not only is it increasing in all the mountainous areas of the planet, but it is growing more rapidly than in the surrounding plains, at an average of 0.2 °C more per century. The precipitation situation is even more serious: the rains are increasingly frequent and unpredictable, and are replacing the snow, which is less and less present.
Ice becomes water. According to the authors of the study, it is a situation similar to that which is affecting the Arctic regions: the loss of snow and ice, also caused by the increase in rainfall, is radically (and very quickly) modifying ecosystems.
These critical conditions not only affect mountain areas, but also affect the plains at their feet: snow cover and glaciers supply billions of people with water. Among these are the populations of China and India, which depend on the Himalayas, whose ice is melting at a very high rate: replacing snow and ice with rain means, among other things, increasing the risk of devastating floods.
Extreme events. All these risks are not hypothetical: there have already been examples of extreme events caused by EDCC, the latest of which was the particularly violent monsoon that hit Pakistan this summer, killing over a thousand people.
In short, mountains are particularly fragile in the face of climate change: pretending nothing has happened and not intervening specifically in these areas means risking catastrophe (or catastrophes).
