Nepal’s worsening water crisis

We must recalibrate our efforts to restore depleting water sources.

The water crisis in the Nepal Himalayas is no longer looming: It’s already underway. Despite over two decades of consistent reports of drying springs and streams across the mountains, we didn’t have any idea about why this was happening to these local water sources. Our limited understanding was based on anecdotes. We naively believed that road construction and deforestation in the mountains were to blame and that stopping haphazard roadworks, greening the mountains and applying rainwater harvesting methods would sufficiently help restore these water sources. However, when Bhutan, which boasts of maintaining over 60 percent forest cover and hasn’t arbitrarily constructed roads through its mountains as we have, reported that over 25 percent of the surveyed springs were drying up, the reasons for declining local water sources became more elusive.