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As tourism and regional pollution contaminate Nepal’s Khumbu Valley, researchers are zapping the ground to find new potable water sources.
When geologist Kirsten Nicholson first visited the Everest National Park in Nepal with her father in 2011, she found that even in a relatively untouched part of the world, communities lacked sufficient access to clean drinking water.
As they trekked over to the Everest Base Camp, she also interrogated the local communities about the environmental challenges, if any, that they were dealing with.
“When I got back, I emailed people looking for projects that we could do to benefit the people in the region,” Nicholson said. Now a professor at Ball State University, Nicholson is involved in several research projects which include finding potable water sources for the local communities of Everest National Park.
In 2014, she and her colleagues conducted the first systematic water quality assessment in the region. Combining this with other water assessments over the years, they published the results in 2020, which found that climate change, in the form of retreating glaciers and a melting snowpack, has a serious impact on the water quality in the Everest region.
Everest National Park, popular among tourists who wish to tour the tallest mountain in the world, receives more than 50,000 visitors every year — more than six times the size of the region’s local population. But this tourism also brings overcrowding and pollution, which threatens to deteriorate even the clean snow melt that flows down the mountain’s valleys.
The communities of Khumbu Valley, which includes major towns such as Namche Bazaar, Thame, and Khumjung, are most vulnerable to these changes. Nicholson’s team also tested “29 community drinking water sources and 5 surface-water sources” and discovered that water sources from lower elevations and populated areas were significantly polluted with high concentrations of bacteria, and that surface water was more polluted than “groundwater-fed springs.”
Everest has seen major changes in the past few decades
Since he first visited the Everest National Park in 1973 at the age of 21, researcher Alton C. Byers has seen it change dramatically.
Now a senior research associate at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado Boulder, he said that the indigenous population of the region has embraced the growing prosperity they have received due to tourism.
“Modernization has changed lifestyles; the traditional agro-pastoral way of life has been replaced, driven by tourism,” Byers said.
In 1973, villages in the National Park including Namche Bazaar, the town that leads towards the base camp, had traditional Sherpa-Tibetan style homes — two-storey houses made out of rocks with animals living on the lower floor and the people living on the top.
“But now, if you look at Namche Bazaar,” Byers said, “it has totally changed.” Namche Bazaar now has about 65 lodges, all modern, first-world-style lodges with flushing toilets, running water, and showers, Byers said, when just two decades ago, a trek to the Everest Base Camp meant staying at a yak herder’s hut, also known as a “goath.”
“Very primitive, and maybe you had potatoes to eat if the yak herder had any,” Byers said.
According to Byers, these modern solutions are part of the problem when it comes to groundwater contamination in the region. In traditional Sherpa homes, human waste was disposed of in communal outhouses called “chirpis” where it was then covered by leaves to be turned into fertilizer. The community is building a few chirpis near the river, Byers said, but the chosen locations mean they will only contaminate the river water further.
But modern sewage systems, while convenient, are not healthy for the water quality in the region. “These flush toilets are connected to septic tanks that leak. Every single septic tank leaks, so you are getting groundwater contamination,” Byers said.
Environmental impacts are not equally felt
“There is a lot of pollution that comes from the Asian and European continents that ends up in the Himalayas,” said Paul Andrew Mayewski, a climate change expert at the University of Maine.
“As the ice melts, pollutants are discharged at the beginning of the melt season—all sorts of pollutants that people in the Northern Hemisphere have been releasing.”
Mayewski has led several expeditions to Everest and is surprised by the changes that small villages and stopover places in the region have seen in the past few decades. “The sheer number of flights going in and out is remarkable,” he added. “With increased population and tourism in the area, the likelihood of contamination is going to increase even more.”
Byers said that Khumbu has always had issues with fresh water supply. “I lived in Khumjung for a year in 1984 while working on my Ph.D., and even then, there was a tremendous water shortage in the village,” he said, emphasizing that the location of the village in the rain shadow regions of the mountain ranges can cause difficulties in acquiring fresh drinking water.
Meanwhile, Kalsang Sherpa and his family, who have been running a lodge in Khumjung, a village in Khumbu Valley, for the past 20 years, say that their family hasn’t experienced any water shortages in his village due to a stream that supplies the entire community. While they have felt the environmental impacts of tourism, they haven’t been severe.
Even the governmental bodies of the region are unaware of the challenges the community faces. “We are not aware of the water contamination issues in the Khumbu Valley,” said Mingma Chiri Sherpa, the mayor of the Khumbu Rural Municipality. Since most of the region’s water sources are located upstream, he considers the water supply as “safe and clean.”
The municipality has carried out several water drinking projects throughout the region, including installing water filtration systems, but the efforts have not been enough. “Maybe if the researchers had shared their findings with us and the local community, we would have taken action right where was needed,” he said. “We are ready to sit down with the researchers to discuss their findings and take necessary actions to improve the water quality and environmental health of our region.”
Finding solutions to an exacerbating crisis
Chasalin Cobb, a graduate student working with geologist Kirsten Nicholson at Ball State University, said that their research team has lately been focusing on finding cleaner sources of groundwater for the communities, “the alternative source that’s naturally filtered and not affected by surface water contamination.”
To do so, Nicholson conducted the first ever Electrical Resistivity Tomography (ERT) survey (a non-invasive method to find potential sources of groundwater) in Khumbu Valley along with her colleagues at Ball State, Kathmandu University in Nepal and several other partners such as Action for Nepal, the Himalayan Trust, and GeoScientists Without Borders.
The method involves passing electrical currents through the ground and calculating the degree of resistance the current experiences as it passes through different materials. The rate of the current varies depending on the material. A central computer picks up these changes and creates a “cool little heat map,” Cobb said. “Low resistivity values on the map hint at a potential source of groundwater.”
The research team found four potential sources of groundwater that the locals could use to supplement their lack of potable water, according to a 2023 study. “There are springs in Namche, and we provided evidence that the water goes further up the mountain and could possibly be captured there as well,” Cobb said.
Nicholson and Cobb had planned to continue their work beyond this study, especially to find and confirm whether the subsurface anomalies the equipment had detected are indeed water aquifers, but lack of funding has put their operation on hold, for now.
“We might come back next year, but we’re not sure,” Nicholson said. “It’s very expensive to get the ERT equipment to Nepal and then into the field, so we’re always on a shoestring budget.”
Cobb said that the time it took to set the equipment up also constrained the number of surveys they could perform. “At most, we managed two surveys in a day,” Cobb said.
Instead of searching for alternative water sources, Byers suggests recycling the waste “grey” water from sewage systems. “Instead of losing millions of liters of water every year to grey water, you can find ways to recycle it and significantly reduce the demand on existing water supplies,” he said.
Cobb believes that implementing better landfill and sewage systems, as well as efficient waste management practices could significantly reduce the negative impact of tourism in the area. But while regulations have been loosely enforced by the government, the burden of water management inevitably falls on the local residents.
“If there were more funding and stricter regulations from higher authorities, it would be easier for everyone to manage these issues,” she said.
Nicholson said that while the Sherpas in the region are doing their best to address the region’s environmental challenges, tourists are less aware of the impact that their activities have on the natural environment. “Tourists are relatively wealthy; they can afford to pay for some of these improvements,” she said.
But the response from tourists has so far been positive. “People were willing to pay additional costs to help support those initiatives,” Nicholson said. “I think things are moving in the right direction.”
