Describe the critical need your solution addresses.

In thirty to fifty years, the seven major rivers flowing from the Tibetan Plateau, nourishing 1.2 billion people in ten countries, will alternately flood and experience drought due to rapid glacial melt. The negative impact on the ecosystem, and the people there, appears to be profound in the extreme.

Explain your initiative in more depth and its stage of development.

Our initiative proposes nothing less than an ecological redesign for the Tibetan plateau and along the principle rivers. The redesign is to create a forest savanna eco-system whose root systems sequesters and releases the waters that the glaciers once did but no longer can. Moreover, the system will have the added benefit of pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, regenerating top soil, creating the carbon sink that vast forests and savanna can. The restoration of bio-diversity would be a natural outcome as well as pure water, the reduction of floods, and if carefully managed, great economic advantage, none of which of the earlier mentioned alternatives offer.

How does your strategy and approach respond creatively and comprehensively to key issues?

(From the poetry.)

The research of Chinese and Indian glaciologists
reveals that
80% of the glaciers in Tibet
and surrounding areas
can disappear in the next 25 years
triggering drought, flood, desertification
and sandstorms
Irrigation and hydroelectric power will suffer

Research indicates
these glaciers will shrink so much
that their melting borders will dry up
profoundly affecting
the Salween, Mekong, Huang-Ho,
Brahmaputra, Yangtze, Ganges,
and Indus River Systems
A Force Majeure has come into being
in the form of Global Warming
that will work to the disadvantage
of 1/6th of the Earth’s population,
or about the 1.2 billion people
who live in the 7 drain basins
that comprise
2,404,820 square miles

The constancy
of a vast ecosystem
is becoming erratic
As the Force Majeure
becomes stronger
any counter force
remains invisible
It is not clear that
the countries of China,
Burma, Laos, Cambodia,
South Vietnam, India,
Bangladesh, Kashmir
and Pakistan can put aside differences
to create a counterforce at
continental scale

Thus, we make
a proposal
That people from
countries affected
by the flow of these waters
meet to generate
a form of governance
that protects
shared commons
enabling
paleobotanical research
to locate forest
and savannah ecosystems
which existed in millennia past
when temperatures were similar to those
which are in the process
of happening now
and thereafter
search to locate similar
or equivalent ecosystems that exist in our now
in other parts of the planet
and to begin designing and in part creating
through assisting the migration
of whole ecosystems
able to replace or restate
those now coming under extreme stress
and with new forest in part replacing
the water holding properties of glaciers
to normalize river systems

Long term survival requires a phase shift
where cultural belief and legal structures flip
from valuing extraction to valuing nurture