A walk in Bhutan’s Himalayas spotlights climate change impacts

September 29, 2026

LAHAUL, HIMACHAL PRADESH – For six days, more than 1,000 people from Bhutan, India, Nepal, Maalysia, Singapore and Vietnam—dubbed climate pilgrims by some—walked through the Himalayan landscapes of Garsha (Lahaul), crossing seven villages and covering more 100 kilometres on foot.

This is no ordinary walk. It is a Pad Yatra, a profound journey on foot, led by Gyalwa Dokhampa and the Drukpa Kung Fu nuns. Unlike most other journeys, this one wasn’t about getting to a destination. The story was in the walking.

Rooted in the Drukpa Order of Buddhism, Pad Yatras, have always carried messages of peace, compassion and care for the plaent—advocating environmental stewardship, living in harmony with nature, non-violence, community empowerment, gender eqaulity and heritage preservation.

The Garsha Eco Pad Yatra, held from September 20 to 26, is no different. With the theme “Walking for Climate and Heritage”, the six-day walk was dedicated to drawing attention to the climate crisis unfolding across the Himalayas and call for urgent global action to combat climate change.

At its heart, the Pad Yatra brings Buddhist teachings on compassion, interdependence and reverence for all life into the climate conversation, turning a spiritual journey on foot into a collective act of witnessing, advocacy and care for the fragile Himalayas, reminding us that caring for nature is inseparable from caring for one another.

In Garsha itself, for example, the journey revealed communities living under climate stress. What the participants of the Pad Yatra have encountered along the way is not only a landscape of breathtaking beauty, but also one that is extremely climate vulnerable.

In the villages, people speak of hotter temperatures, erratic snowfall and rapidly shifting seasons. Some communities live beside rivers, others beneath glaciers or on steep mountain slopes. Each is exposed to a different combination of risks.

“There are no longer seasons in Garsha,” said one of the villagers.

“It is September and it is unusally hot, which is unheard of until recently,” said another villager.

But the significance of the walk extends far beyond Garsha.

The Hindu Kush Himalayas stretch across eight countries, including Bhutan, India and Nepal, and are among the most climate-sensitive mountain regions in the world. The mountains are home to more than 270 million people, while the river systems originating here provide water and ecosystem services to nearly two billion people downstream.

The changes are happening at a pace that scientists say is accelerating.

A 2026 assessment by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) found that glaciers across the Hindu Kush Himalayas are losing ice at twice the rate recorded since 2000, with some glaciers having lost up to 27 metres of ice thickness since 1975.

For mountain communities, a warming Himalayas does not simply mean warmer days. It also means unstable slopes, changing water availability, flash floods, landslides, glacial lake outburst floods, loss of lives and livelihoods, and damage to roads, bridges and homes.

Those risks are already being witnessed.

In Jhalman village along the Pad Yatra route, residents described a flood in June that swept away a bridge and sections of road. The flood was linked to glacial melt upstream. In Sissu, the expansion of Ghepan Lake, amid accelerating glacier melt, poses a severe glacial lake outburst flood risk.

Across the wider Himalayas, the recent disasters have offered similarly stark reminders with the Nepal flood bringing a sharp focus on the acute climate vulnerability of the mountain communities living with glaciers.

Scientists are increasingly warning that a changing Himalayan cryosphere is creating a complex mix of risks. ICIMOD’s 2026 regional outlook notes that glaciers are losing mass, snowfall patterns are shifting, permafrost is degrading and river flows are becoming less predictable, increasing risks from floods, landslides, avalanches and glacial lake outburst floods.

“This matters to Bhutan as much as it does to communities in northern India or Nepal. The mountains may be divided by national borders, but the climate system is not,” said a participant from Bhutan.

The glaciers, snowfields, rivers and ecosystems of the Hindu Kush Himalayas are interconnected. Changes in the high mountains affect water, food, energy, livelihoods and infrastructure across the region. And the consequences travel far beyond the valleys where the changes first become visible.

For those walking through Garsha, this understanding has emerged not from a scientific report but from the experience of being on the ground. They have felt the unusual September heat themselves. They have walked through villages exposed to rivers and glaciers. They have listened to communities describe snowfall that no longer arrives when it once did.

“Climate change is not a distant threat. It is a daily reality in Garsha,” the organisers said after six days on the trail.

That reality is increasingly shared across the Hindu Kush Himalayas.

The region is often called the “Water Tower of Asia” because its snow and ice feed some of the continent’s major river systems. Its changing cryosphere therefore has implications not only for mountain communities, but for populations far downstream.

The challenge is consequently larger than protecting individual glaciers or preparing for individual disasters. It is about safeguarding an entire mountain system on which millions of lives and livelihoods depend. For Bhutan, a country whose identity, ecosystems and communities are deeply connected to the Himalayas, that message carries particular weight.

Pad Yatra’s response is deliberately simple: walk, listen, witness and make the changes visible. Along the way, participants collected waste, planted 108 trees and raised awareness about environmental conservation and climate action.

But the deeper message emerging from the journey is that the Himalayas cannot be viewed simply as a distant landscape of snow peaks and glaciers. They are a living system and that system is changing.

The question now is not whether the Himalayas are vulnerable to climate change. The evidence is increasingly clear. The question is how quickly the countries that share these mountains can understand, prepare for and respond to what is already unfolding, and how can the world come together to save the Hiamlayas because what happens in the mountains does not remain here. Its impacts recah far beyond the Himalayas, moving downstream through rivers, economies, food systems, communities and generations.