Samira Patel writes about Ladakh where climate change migration affects migration on both a short-term and longer term basis.
Ladakh is a case study in how climate change migration is not just an issue of mass displacement from intensifying natural disasters, but how climactic change can be a gradual process. With such changes, migration is simply a fact of life and another form of adaptation, not an impending disaster.
Samira Patel
Ladakh is a small region where a myriad of mountain ranges meet – the Karakorum to the north, the Tibetan Plateau to the east, and it lies nestled within the Western Himalayas. Historically, Ladakh was located at a bustling intersection of Silk Road trade, but it is now situated at the crossroads of three countries – China, India and Pakistan – and at two contested borders. It is in one of the main districts of this region in the Indian Himalayas that I found myself walking with a professor from the University of Ladakh. We were at an altitude of about 12,000 feet and he pointed to the line of mountains directly across from us where the Indian tectonic plate meets the Eurasian plate.In many places the history of the landscape might not be immediately obvious, but here in Ladakh, a high-altitude desert, such things feel rather stark. As a well-known Ladakh historian, Janet Rizvi, said: “Here the bones of the earth not only protrude through the mantle which life has cast over them…but are given only the scantiest covering.”Later, the professor joked with me that this meant anyone living South of this convergence would lose 20 seconds from their commute every year as the Indian plate pushes against the Eurasian plate, moving northeast at about 5cm/year.While he was being facetious, his anecdote spoke to the idea of thinking about how the earth moves in relation to our own daily migrations and movements. As climate change intensifies, we see across the world how various natural disasters are transforming communities and displacing large swaths of people. But these do not occur in a vacuum. In Ladakh, people have long been attuned to migratory patterns, not just their own as the home of a critical pastoralist community, but also of the ecosystem surrounding it. People have noticed the migration of insects slowly moving north to Ladakh, sometimes bringing infectious disease, just as other plants and animals also continue to shift with the climate. This is a place that simultaneously requires people to be responsive to the smallest of changes, and yet resilient to the most drastic of them.Ladakh is unusual in the Himalayas because it is in the rain shadow of the monsoon, which means it receives limited rain during the year and relies primarily on glaciers for water and energy. At the same time, it is undergoing changes that have resonances in many parts of the world. It is experiencing unusual flooding, glacier retreat, drought, less snow every year and environmental degradation.This is p
