Tibetan Plateau is turning green

Despite hazards of global warming, 'ecology improving'

The Tibetan Plateau is turning green, as the high altitude amplifies the effects of global warming, according to a climate change report published on Wednesday by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

According to the report, the average temperature on the Tibetan Plateau increased 1.5 to 2 C over the past half-century, twice the world's average rate of increase.

The warming weather, despite aggravated glacier retreat and increased risks for geological hazards, did help to improve the ecological environment on the plateau, such as increasing the area of forests and grassland.

"The Tibetan Plateau, with its extremely cold climate, thin air and ancient glaciers. ... has attracted extensive attention worldwide in terms of its ecological environment and sustainability of development," said Chen Fahu, vice-president of Lanzhou University in Gansu province, who participated in compiling the report.

In the past three years, scientists from the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a number of other research institutes and universities evaluated the environmental changes on the plateau by analyzing research results from the past 50 years. Then they predicted trends for the plateau in the next 100 years.

"Through 26 indicators related to temperatures, rainfall, glaciers, snow cover and lakes, we came to the conclusion that the ecological environment on the Tibetan Plateau is becoming better," Chen said.

Increasing temperatures on the plateau brought more humidity and plant cover. Additionally, ecology protection projects of the Chinese government since the 1960s played a role in restoring forests, grasslands and wetlands.

"The government had established ecological protection zones, carried out projects to restore plant cover zones and built an ecological safety barrier on the plateau, which played an active role in the environmental improvement," said Xu Baiqing, a researcher at the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research.

However, earlier research detected pollutants being carried onto the plateau from neighboring countries to the south and west of China. Additionally, an April report in Scientific Reports, an online open-access journal of the Nature Publishing Group, said that the Himalayas are no longer a barrier to smoke from south Asia's cooking stoves and forest fires.

chengyingqi@chinadaily.com.cn