A delegation of Tibetans is, for the first time, attending the United Nation’s climate-change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.
The Tibetans have come to Copenhagen in order to present new information about how China's environmental policies on the Tibetan Plateau are worsening an already dire climate-change crisis there. These policies are also creating human-rights crises, in Tibet now and for possibly more than a billion people downstream in south and Southeast Asia.
Tibet, the world’s largest and highest plateau, is known as the Earth’s third pole because it has more freshwater, stored as glacial ice, than any other region on Earth except the North and South poles.
The Tibetan Plateau is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world; the vast majority of its 40,000 glaciers are melting, fundamentally altering the water supplies of Asia's great rivers that begin on the Tibetan plateau and which are the lifeline for more than a billion people in ten downstream countries.
Information for this report was provided by Tibet Third Pole.