Climbers and climate change putting Everest at risk, Nepal

Euronews

27-05-2025

Nepal's government says it has a 'duty to protect' the Himalayas from the risks presented by climate change and the growing numbers of climbers attempting to scale the region's summits, especially Everest.
'The government is strongly committed to support mountaineering in every possible way by keeping climbers safe, by protecting the natural beauty of our peaks and by helping local communities grow alongside the spirit of adventure,' Nepal's tourism minister Badri Prasad Pandey said today.
He was speaking in Kathmandu at a gathering of about 100 climbers from around the world who have successfully tackled Mount Everest. The one-day conference, dubbed the Everest Summiteers Summit, involved discussions on how to protect climbers and the environment.
Attendees expressed concern about the rising numbers of people who crowd Everest to try to scale the 8,849-metre peak. Veterans have complained how the mountain is becoming crowded and dirty.
Climbers normally spend weeks at base camp to acclimatise to the higher altitude. They make practice runs to the lower camps on Everest before beginning their final attempt on the peak.
Nepal's government last year funded a team of soldiers and Sherpas to remove 11 tonnes of garbage, four dead bodies and a skeleton from Everest during the climbing season.
'Today, climate change and global warming are putting this future at risk. That is why we must act with care, with wisdom and with a deep sense of respect,' Pandey said. 'These mountains are sacred, and it is our duty to protect them for the generations yet to come.'
Nepal doesn't have rules on how many days climbers must spend acclimatising or making practice climbs. The permits to climb Everest, which cost $11,000 (around €9,700) each, are valid for 90 days. Climbing season normally wraps up by the end of May, when the weather deteriorates and monsoon season begins.
Mount Everest was conquered in 1953 by New Zealander Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay. Since then it has been climbed thousands of times and every year hundreds more attempt to reach the summit.
The popularity of the challenge means climbers face increased risks as queues form on the routes to the summit during the short windows of good weather, crowding the narrow and dangerous path to the summit though icy ridges and steep slopes.
There is also concern over the levels of experience of some climbers, who put themselves at risk as well as making climbs dangerous for others.
'The biggest issue and concern at the moment is overcrowding,' said Adriana Brownlee, the youngest woman to climb the world's 14 highest peaks. 'We need to make sure that those [people on the mountain] are all experienced in the mountaineering world. So that if they are struggling [or] they are on their own and something happens, they know how to save themselves.'
Nepalese climber Purnima Shrestha said attempts to climb Mount Everest have become too commercialised.
'But not all the people there are physical and emotionally ready to climb the peak, that is being disrespectful to Everest,' she said. 'This is the reason why there's all the traffic jams on the way to the peak.'
Meanwhile, an experienced British mountain guide is championing the benefits of using xenon gas to make climbing Everest quicker, and better for the environment.
Lukas Furtenbach took a team of British climbers, who left London on 16 May, to scale the peak on 21 May. They returned home two days later, in one of the fastest ascents on record of the world's highest peak, including the climbers' travel from their homes and back.
The use of xenon gas treatment has, however, drawn controversy and has even raised the concerns of Nepalese mountaineering authorities who have announced an investigation.
'The only reason why we are working with xenon is to make climbing safer, to protect climbers from high altitude sickness,' Furtenbach told AP upon his return to Kathmandu. 'We can see people dying on Everest every year and this may be one step to improve the situation to make climbing high altitude mountains safer.'
The climbers had put in months of preparation, training in hypoxia tents, and underwent a xenon gas treatment at a clinic in Germany just two weeks before heading to Nepal.
Climbers normally spend weeks at base camp to acclimatise to the higher altitude. They make practice runs to the lower camps on Everest before beginning their final attempt on the peak so that their bodies are prepared for the low pressure and lower level of oxygen available.
Furtenbach said the ability to climb the peak in a shorter period of time could lead to less environmental impact on the mountain.
'Human waste is one of the biggest problems on Everest base camp. If people spend one week there compared to eight weeks, it is a 75 per cent reduction of human waste," he said. "It is a huge reduction of garbage on the mountain and also of resources that have to be carried up to the back camp and have to be carried up the mountain.'
Nepal's mountaineering department issued a press statement saying it was going to investigate the use of xenon gas.
Furtenbach said the gas was never used in Nepal and that he could prove that it was safe to use for climbers.
The European Union is betting on carbon capture and storage (CCS) to decarbonise heavy industrial emitters.
The bloc has set ambitious capacity targets to that end: 50 million tonnes of CO2 annually by 2030, rising to 280 million tonnes in 2040. But this will require a huge scaling up.
CCS involves capturing CO2 from industrial emitters or power factories, liquefying it, and transporting the CO2 via pipeline, trucks or ships before storing it underground in depleted oil or gas reservoirs or saline aquifers.
Today, there are only five operational CCS projects in Europe, capturing a total of 2.7 million tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) each year. Of this,1.7 MtCO2 (63 per cent of the total) is for natural gas processing in Norway, which is outside of the EU.
So the strategy requires building a complex infrastructure network from scratch at significant cost. The European Commission has said Europe might need 19,000 km of CO2 pipelines by 2050 to meet this target.
These plans could cost taxpayers up to €140 billion by 2050, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
But a joint investigation by several European newsrooms shows that recurring problems with high costs and technical issues are already threatening the success of three major CO2 transport and storage projects receiving EU support.
This questions the feasibility of the current EU climate strategy which heavily relies on carbon capture and storage, a technology favoured by oil and gas companies but which has largely historically failed to meet targets.
As of 2023, governments and corporations had spent over $83 billion (€73bn) on CCS projects globally, according to Bloomberg. But that same year, the technology only captured around 0.1 per cent of global emissions.
For Europe to reach its targets, capacity will need to expand dramatically. In its most recent round, 40 per cent of Emissions Trading System (ETS) revenues to the Innovation Fund were awarded to carbon capture storage and utilisation projects. The ETS is a major funding program for low-carbon technology financed by the bloc's cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas emissions.
This 'one-track' focus could mean other decarbonisation tools - such as expanding clean energy and improving energy efficiency - are potentially being sidelined, according to a report by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).
One example is cement, where Innovation Fund grants in all but one case support CCS to reduce emissions, rather than investigating means to reduce CO2 in the industrial process directly.
As part of a joint investigation by IRPI, Follow the Money, L'Humanite and Mondiaal Nieuws, we looked at three projects supported by the EU.
The projects analysed - Northern Lights in Norway, Pycasso in France, and Callisto in France and Italy - were only three of 14 projects selected by the European Commission as Projects of Common Interests (PCIs), but they point to issues facing efforts to scale CCS across the continent.
Northern Lights in Norway, which expects to start operating this year, is run by three fossil fuel companies: Total Energies from France, UK-headquartered Shell, and Equinor, which is majority owned by the Norwegian state.
It plans to store 1.5 million tonnes of emissions within a few years, starting with emissions from fertiliser producer Yara, Danish energy company Orsted and cement company Heidelberg Materials.
But an investigation published in Follow the Money shows the project will face prohibitive costs and shipping capacity issues.
Northern Lights will rely on two specially designed ships which will collect and transport liquefied CO2 captured by polluters in Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway. It will then be shipped to the port in Øygarden – located west of the city of Bergen – and pumped via a 100-kilometre pipeline into geological reservoirs under the seabed in the North Sea, where it is intended to be stored permanently.
Transporting and storing one tonne of CO2 under phase one of the Northern Lights project would have an average cost of $145 (€128), according to data analytics company Wood Mackenzie.
In addition to these expenses, there is the cost of capturing CO2 on-site, which differs by industry. Estimates from the International Energy Agency (IEA) suggest average costs per tonne of $30 (€27) for ammonia, a compound primarily used in fertiliser production.
Under these estimates, Yara might have to pay between $140 to $202 million (€123 to €178 million) every year to reach its targets to reduce only a proportion of emissions from one site. That's a significant amount for a company that posted $229 million earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization in Europe last year.
Northern Lights faces other challenges. The project will rely on ships to transport CO2, but specialised boats are required to transport CO2, and with only two such ships built and available, the project will likely struggle to meet its own targets. Each ship can only carry 8,000 tonnes of CO2 per trip.
Under existing contracts, Northern Lights will receive 1.63 million tonnes each year to store.
Northern Lights has now commissioned two further liquefied CO2 ships which are due to be completed in 2026, though it is not clear when they will start transporting emissions. Even with all four ships in service, more will be needed soon as the project expands, the investigation found. Any delays from bad weather or technical difficulties with ships will further jeopardise the project's ability to meet targets.
Transporting CO2 either by ship or pipeline raises further issues. Unlike natural gas, CO2 becomes corrosive when mixed with water. The ship's storage tanks need to be cleaned with dry CO2 gases to avoid any contamination with humid air, every time after unloading.
Another project, Callisto, which aims to transport CO2 from industrial emitters in France to a storage site off Italy's Adriatic coast, faces similar issues.
Callisto, a joint venture by Italian energy multinational Eni, infrastructure company Snam and Air Liquide, a French company providing oil and gas services, aims to create the largest multimodal carbon capture and storage network in the Mediterranean.
The project seeks to create a complete supply chain for the capture, transport and storage of carbon in southwestern Europe.
But while Callisto plans to transport CO2 from industrial clients in Italy via pipeline, emissions from French companies will be transported via ship from southeastern France circumventing the Italian peninsula to the Adriatic, Irpi media reported.
The construction and maintenance of dedicated infrastructures, such as pipelines and ships, along with transport and capture costs, represent a significant investment.
The current price paid by polluters under the Emissions Trading System (ETS) is around €80 per tonne, too low to justify a business case for companies to pay for CCS. "Even with equal unit capture costs, transport from very distant sources would have prohibitive costs, difficult to reconcile with the current values ​​of ETS certificates," Roberto Bencini, an expert on CCS for the European Commission, told IRPI media.
ETS prices are not just low but also volatile, meaning transport costs could quickly make storage costs prohibitive, putting the profitability of projects at risk.
'The problem is more so that the price is volatile. So no one's going to make an investment for 15 years unless they have some form of a guarantee of what the price is going to be,' says Eadbhard Pernot, Secretary-General of Zero Emissions Platform (ZEP) initiative, which includes many oil and gas companies involved in European CCS projects.
Those projects which have gone ahead rely on carbon contracts for difference - agreements where a government contracts with a company to guarantee a specific carbon price over a set period for a low-carbon project - says Pernot.
Finally, France's Pycasso project shows a different, but equally pressing issue for CCS infrastructure.
By storing CO2 closer to industrial emitters, Pycasso pursued a strategy that could have lowered costs. But the project was abandoned last year because of local opposition: as one MP told L'Humanite, Pycasso would have threatened the 1,700 jobs at the existing gas field in Lacq, while creating only around 80 new jobs.
For CCS advocates, the economic challenges facing CCS are a sign it should receive more public money. 'We are trying to get a new technology up and running on a commercial scale. And there are risks here which the private sector will probably not take, unless governments agree to provide some sort of de-risking support,' says Chris Davies, head of CCS Europe.
But critics argue Europe risks betting on CCS as a miracle solution at the expense of harder choices about resource use and changing patterns in industrialisation.
'It's an example of how we are relying above all on technology to reduce emissions. That can't be the only solution. It can be part of the packet, but it should not have the emphasis it is receiving right now,' Maury says.
With issues around economic viability and feasibility issues, some fear the focus on CCS could distract from meaningful climate action.
'The biggest risk with CCS is we waste a decade and however many billions of euros not doing climate action that we know would work,' Rachel Kennerley of the Center for International Environmental Law told Euronews Green.
Additional reporting from Carlotta Indiano, Beatrice Cambarau, Bart Grugeon Plana, David Haas, Jule Zentek, Simon Guichard.