From The Waters of the Third Pole report prepared by Aon Benfi eld UCL (Hazard Research Centre, University College London), China Dialogue, Humanitarian Futures Programme (King’s College London) has an interesting annexe.

It explains: “The following stories are not necessarily intended to approximate reality, but this approach can be used to challenge conventional thinking and to enable policy- and decision-makers to think ‘out of the box’.

Is this scenario so improbable?

Thanks to Claude Arpi

I snipped this from the overview of the report

The hazard profile of the HKH (Hindu Kush-Himalayan) region drainage basins generally varies with height. The mountainous upper reaches are more prone to earthquakes (eg. the Kashmir event in 2005), mass movements (eg. the giant failure of part of the west side of Nanga Parbat in 1841) and floods arising from the failure of natural dams and the boundaries of glacial lakes (eg. Dig Tsho in Nepal in 1985 and Lugge Tsho in Bhutan in 1994). Flatter downstream sections, deltas and coasts are more likely to experience floods (eg. the Bihar event in India in 2008), droughts (eg. as in South-East Asia in 2005), windstorms and storm surges (eg. Cyclone Sidr in Bangladesh in 2007 and Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar in 2008), and groundwater contamination (eg. the ongoing arsenic problem in the Bengal basin). However, any of these events in one part of the region could also affect other parts of the region through, for example, loss of agricultural production and livelihoods, and migration and possible intra and inter-state conflict.

The HKH region offers an extraordinary panoply of future crisis drivers. The permutations of interlocking natural hazards and human interventions suggest crisis drivers unusual for both their complexity and their unpredictable dynamics. When these are placed in the context of a region of high population density and severe socio-economic pressures, the numbers of people affected by the impact of future crisis drivers could possibly overshadow some of the worst calamities that have befallen the continent of Africa in the previous two decades.

The analysis in this section focuses on the potential consequences of six types of natural phenomena: floods, earthquakes, mass movements, hazards in deltas and coastal zones, arsenic contamination, and fires and atmospheric brown clouds. When combined with the effects of human activities, these phenomena could plausibly lead to severe humanitarian crises in the HKH region over the next two decades. These six hazards, as discussed below, could trigger crises resulting from food insecurity, mass migration, destruction of human habitats and infrastructure, damage to industry and livelihoods, and exponential increases in disease and conflict.

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