Women, who do most of the water-fetching and firewood-gathering, are forced to walk further and further for essentials each day. Crop failures mean hunger and malnutrition.
Temperatures, like a seasoned sherpa hiking up Mount Everest, climb fast at higher elevations—as much as 8 times faster in the Himalayas than elsewhere on the planet over the last three decades. With warmer weather comes a raft of vector-borne diseases for which these cold-adapted communities have no defense.
Weak, sick, hungry, thirsty. So much for Shangri-La.