Only one murder has been committed this year in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan.
Soil erosion is particularly bad in the Himalayan foothills where most north Indian rivers rise.
The Himalayan glaciers, it turned out, weren't going to melt in 30 years.
In 1950, a French expedition reached the top of the Himalayan peak of Annapurna in Nepal for the first time.
Furthermore, in the past half-century the Himalayan region has seen fewer powerful earthquakes than might be predicted from historical records.
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It is all the harder in the Himalayan region, with hidden underground faults that are poorly monitored by seismic instruments.
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Remittances from the Gulf play a huge role in the Himalayan nation, where about 30% of the people are unemployed.
The creator of the app, Joe Shrimpton, is a trekking aficionado, with 19 years of trekking the Himalayan region under his belt.
Weddings are being held inside sets made of canvas tents painted to look like the Himalayan battlefield, with sack-stuffed "troops" standing guard.
The website is devoted to protecting the environment in the Himalayan region.
Nepal's political parties have been wrangling over the country's new form of government since the abolition of the Himalayan nation's monarchy in 2008.
But just last week, the IPCC issued what has been called an unprecedented apology for including the Himalayan glacier claim in its report.
And if that were not bad enough, the Himalayan valleys act as chimneys, pumping pollutants from the Indian plains to the mountain peaks.
And officials in the Himalayan town of Gilgit say the Karakoram Highway that links Pakistan with China has been blocked by landslides at several points.
In 1990, King Birendra of Nepal proclaimed a new constitution that restored multi-party democracy to the Himalayan kingdom and stripped him of his absolute power.
Most of Nepal's national parks and protected areas are either in the Himalayan region or in the Tarai area, the southern plain land that border India.
And they know the reason for the pollution: the three-wheeled taxis, called Vikram tempos, whose diesel fumes spoil the otherwise sweet air of the Himalayan state.
The ice fields in the Himalayan mountains have receded dramatically from their breadth and depth in the 1980s, according to the Australian environmentalist.
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Around the same time it emerged that the most recent IPCC report had claimed that the Himalayan glaciers were going to disappear by 2035, instead of 2350.
The worry is not that the Himalayan glaciers will disappear.
Before the 1960s Imja was a glacier, but a recent temperature increase in the Himalayan region melted it into a substantial lake, which glistens under the shadow of the awe-inspiring Everest range.
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Russ Juskalian, 30, is a journalist based in Munich who has reported from Southeast Asia, above the Arctic Circle in Finnish Lapland and from the Himalayan foothills in Indian-controlled Kashmir.
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Next to take to the streets was the Nepal Federation of Indigenous Nationalities, claiming to represent various peoples from the Himalayan foothills, which began its own series of crippling strikes.
The notion of having a "happiness index" to track a country's power to smile, not just to spend, used to be the quirky preserve of the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan.
Purves is very concerned about the glaciers in the Himalayan mountains that are the main source of water for irrigation and drinking in China and India, well over 2 billion people.
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Global climate change is also expected to have major impacts on water supply in India, rapidly melting the Himalayan glaciers upon which many people depend and increasing rainfall variability across the subcontinent.
The IPCC asserted in its 2007 report that the Himalayan glaciers would likely melt by 2035 due to global warming, prompting great alarm across southern and eastern Asia, where glaciers feed major rivers.
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Known best as the guiding metric of the Himalayan nation of Bhutan, GNH tracks not merely economic output and consumption, but factors like access to health care, education and nature, and evolves based on continuous input from citizens.
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" Indeed, some of our favorite scents cannot be found in nature: several musks (traditionally an extract from a gland of the Himalayan musk deer), ambers (a blend of resins) and lemons, as well as "at least two crucial lily-of-the-valley components.
The Himalayan Rescue Association, a non-profit health organization that offers safety seminars to trekkers in Manang, warns that ascending more than 300 or 400 metres higher than the previous day's sleeping altitude is not safe, especially when you are above 3, 000 metres.
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