Nepal’s top politicians strapped on oxygen tanks yesterday and held a Cabinet meeting in the frigid, thin air of Mount Everest to highlight the danger global warming poses to glaciers ahead of next week’s international climate change talks.
The government billed the stunt as the world’s highest Cabinet meeting. The ministers posed for pictures and signed a commitment to tighten environmental regulations and expand the nation’s protected areas.
“The Everest declaration was a message to the world to minimize the negative impact of climate change on Mount Everest and other Himalayan mountains,” Nepalese Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal later said.
Global warming, worsened by greenhouse-gas emissions, is melting glaciers from Switzerland to the Himalayas, threatening water and food security for 1.6 billion people in South Asia, an Asian Development Bank study said.
The Himalayas are the source of India’s Ganges River, China’s Yangtze, River; Nepal’s main river the Karnali and Pakistan’s longest, the Indus. More than 40 percent of Earth’s population lives in China and India and relies on the rivers for drinking water and irrigation.
The event came ahead of the international climate change conference that begins on Monday in Copenhagen, Denmark, and was intended “to get the world’s attention on the impact global warming is having on underdeveloped countries like Nepal,” Environment Minister Thakur Sharma said.
Nepal’s negotiation team in Copenhagen will push for wealthy countries to commit 1.5 percent of their earnings to help poorer nations protect the environment, he said.
Getting the ministers to the mountain safely required extensive planning.
The prime minister, his two deputy prime ministers and the 20 Cabinet ministers were examined by doctors before boarding helicopters to Kalapathar, a flat area at an altitude of 5,250m next to Everest base camp, the jumping point for climbers seeking to scale the peak.
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