Himalaya Nature Nonprofits

The Himalaya are the youngest and highest mountains on Earth, still rising as India drives north into Asia, and they function as the water tower of a continent. The glaciers and snowfields of the range and the Tibetan plateau behind it feed the Indus, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Mekong, the Yangtze, and the Yellow River, and something approaching two billion people live downstream of that ice.

The ice is going. Himalayan glaciers are retreating at rates that vary across the range but that point, in aggregate, in one direction, and the immediate danger is not drought but flood: meltwater pooling behind unstable moraine dams that can give way without warning and send a wall of water down a valley. The snow leopard moves through this country, and the red panda, and communities whose agriculture depends on meltwater arriving on schedule.

The organizations here monitor the glaciers and the lakes forming behind them, protect the snow leopard and its prey in partnership with herding communities, and defend the forests of the middle hills whose loss makes every landslide worse.