At the foothills of the Himalayas, the Uttarakhand region attracts the attention of the Indian government. The state of 10 million people, bordering China and Nepal, has become a vast open-air construction site. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government intends to capitalize on the region’s geographic position and turn it into a renewable energy hub.
India, the world’s third-biggest carbon emitter, which gets 80 percent of its electricity from coal, expects to build large-scale hydropower in the region to achieve carbon neutrality by 2070. Uttarakhand certainly has advantages: the state is home to dozens of rivers, especially the Ganges and Yamuna, the country’s largest waterways. But apart from being located in an earthquake zone, Uttarakhand is threatened by global warming, which is causing its glaciers to melt faster.
In the last decade, the region has experienced natural disasters every year: landslides, avalanches, glacial collapse and even “storms”, sudden storms that can destroy a valley in a matter of minutes. In 2013, around 10,000 Hindu pilgrims died due to sudden bad weather while praying at a religious site. The bodies of nearly 4,000 of them have yet to be found.
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