Not a drop to drink: how water scarcity will soon be Asia's defining crisis.

• Author: Larson, Christina

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Tenzin Dorje lives in a small village on the slopes of the rugged Qilian Mountains in western China's Gansu Province. The old Tibetan shepherd must walk farther each year to find water for his sheep to drink. He now spends as much as six hours every day leading his flock to find water, he told me; he remembers when his trek was half that.

The glaciers on the Tibetan plateau that feed nearby streams are slowly receding, altering the pattern of snowmelt trickling down into mountain streams. The region's glacier system delivers water to more than 300 million people in China, and 1 billion across Asia. Yet the lofty area is also among the globe's most rapidly warming. Average annual temperatures on the "rooftop of the world" have climbed 2 degrees Celsius in two decades, about twice the global average. Chinese scientists expect the total area of the glaciers to halve every ten years. By 2100, they predict, the glaciers may have largely vanished. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences estimates that the glacial area on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the world's largest ice sheets outside the poles, is shrinking about 7 percent each year. In some parts of Asia, precipitation and river flows are increasing with warming weather, but near his home Tenzin says water is becoming even more scarce.

You might think that the science of climate change would be the last thing on the locals' mind, as foreign and perplexing as a visiting blue-eyed journalist in an REI jacket stopping in for yak-butter tea. But that assumption would be wrong.

Not far from Tenzin's village stands the Tibetan Midi Temple, perched on a mountainside overlooking a snowy valley and a white pagoda temple. Here reside fifteen lamas, including the studious twentysomething Zahxi Rangou. The young monk has two rooms: the outer room is warmed by a stove for visitors; the inner room is cold and full of books and a computer. Here he spends his days in prayer and study. He has Internet access, and is well read on climate science. "The glacier is depleting," he told me, matter-of-factly. "It's melting in the summer. And the weather near here is getting drier." He says he doesn't use e-mail, because it can so easily be monitored by government officials suspicious of Tibetan religious figures. But Zahxi is gathering information, and sees it as part of his mission and ministry to understand and explain to local residents like the old shepherd what it means that the world...