Srinagar – The western Himalaya, encompassing Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh, is warming faster than the central and eastern stretches of the Himalayan range and could lose vast quantities of seasonal snow by the end of this century if greenhouse gas emissions remain high, a new scientific study has warned.
The study, based on 120 years of observed temperature records and projections from eight global climate models, finds that the western Himalaya consistently emerges as the most climate-sensitive section of the Indian Himalayan region—warming more rapidly and losing more snow than other parts of the range under every emissions pathway examined.
Published in the Journal of Earth System Science, the research paints a particularly worrying picture for the mountains that feed major river systems and sustain millions of people downstream.
The study, titled “Vulnerability of the Himalayan region under climate change”, was led by researchers from the Department of Remote Sensing and Geoinformatics at Birla Institute of Technology (BIT), Mesra, in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, and Ashoka University.
Its findings suggest that the fate of the Himalayan snowpack—particularly in Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh and Himachal Pradesh—will depend heavily on how quickly the world cuts greenhouse gas emissions.
The Himalaya is often viewed as one vast, interconnected mountain system. But the new research suggests that climate change is unfolding unevenly across its length.
The researchers divided the Indian Himalayan region into three broad sectors—the western Himalaya, covering Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh; the central Himalaya, largely comprising Uttarakhand; and the eastern Himalaya, including Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh and the wider North-East.
Together, these regions contain more than 15,000 glaciers and form the headwaters of the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra river systems, on which roughly 1.5 billion people depend.
Using CRU TS v4.07 temperature observations spanning 1901 to 2020 and an ensemble of eight CMIP6 global climate models, the researchers reconstructed past warming trends and projected future changes up to 2100 under five different emissions scenarios.
The results point repeatedly towards the western Himalaya as the region under the greatest pressure.
“The Himalaya is often discussed as a single system, but our observations and models both say otherwise. The western Himalaya consistently emerges as the most sensitive stretch—it warms the most and loses the most snow under every pathway we tested. That has direct consequences for the states that sit in it,” said Protyusha Mukhopadhyay, the study’s lead author from BIT Mesra.
The warming is not a distant future scenario. It has already happened.
Compared with the first three decades of the twentieth century, winter temperatures had risen by close to 1°C across all three Himalayan sectors by the period ending in 2014.
The western Himalaya recorded winter warming of 1.06°C, compared with 0.96°C in the central Himalaya and 1.09°C in the eastern Himalaya.
Spring warming was even more pronounced in the west, reaching 1.08°C, compared with 0.83°C in both the central and eastern Himalayan regions.