Glaciers Melting Due to Habitat Destruction

Ecologists are warning that the destruction of vegetation in Tajikistan’s highest mountain areas is destroying the local environment and increasing the risk of glacial melting.



The Pamir Media news agency reported on January 20 that the eastern Pamir mountains are losing their sparse covering of bushes as people cut the plants to burn as fuel. In the Murgab area of Badakhshan, in eastern Tajikistan, for example, the local “teresken” plant has been almost completely wiped out within an 80 kilometre radius of the villages there, as people have no other source of fuel.



The news agency warned that since these bushes are the only form of vegetation in the area, the area is likely to turn into a desert.



Davlatshoh Gulmahmadov, director of the government’s agency for land improvement and cartography, says over 97 per cent of the land in Tajikistan is at risk of degradation due to uncontrolled deforestation.



“People cut down trees and destroy other plants, which leads to landslides, avalanches, floods and mudslides, causing erosion,” said Gulmahmadov.



Saulius Smalis, an environmental advisor with the OSCE in the capital Dushanbe, says it is not just deforestation, but the gradual destruction of pasture lands, that leads to the risk of desertification.



Ecologists warn that the destruction of mountain vegetation has a global impact.



“When the bushes are destroyed, this [loosening of soil] can lead to dust storms in the eastern Pamirs. The dust settles on glaciers and they [absorb more heat and] melt more rapidly,” says Svetlana Blagoveschenskaya, an ecologist and biologist expert working on a European Union environmental project.



The Pamir Mountains are home to Central Asia’s largest glaciers, which feed the Amu Darya, one of the region’s two great rivers.



Blagoveshenskaya says deforestation will only end when the Tajik government starts providing people with alternative sources of fuel.



Gulmahmadov told NBCentralAsia that the government adopted a national action programme for combating desertification back in 2001 - but there are no funds available to implement it.



(News Briefing Central Asia draws comment and analysis from a broad range of political observers across the region.)