Report of the Webinar on China’s Rapacity for Mining Tibetan Resources: When Will the Greed End? (Climate Crisis in Tibet-III)

Martin A. Mills, Gabriel Lafitte, Zsuzsa Anna Ferenczy, Sriparna Pathak, Lobsang Yangtso & Jagannath Panda

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The Tibetan Plateau – Asia’s water tower and China’s major source for critical minerals like copper and lithium – is facing severe ecological degradation due to China’s extensive infrastructure projects, including mega-dam building, forced relocation of Tibetans, and mining. The increase in the so-called development projects such as the 2006 Golmud-Lhasa railway link among other such initiatives via China’s “Western Development Strategy,” or the “Go west” policy have only facilitated exploitation of Tibet's natural reserves including critical minerals.

Although, on paper China has referred to its development strategy in Tibet – which it has now renamed as “Xizang” to scuttle the region’s identity further – as a tool to provide economic reforms in the western provinces, at par to the highquality development in other well-to-do parts. However, rather than reducing poverty, industrial development and other such activities are wreaking havoc on the already accelerated rate of climate change in the region, which is threatening not only the water security of downstream nations like India and Bangladesh but also Tibet’s own biodiversity and entire Himalayan ecosystem.