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“This is the climate crisis you haven’t heard of,” Wester said.

The five-year study looked at the effects of climate change on a region that cuts across Asia through Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, China, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Myanmar. The area has glaciers that feed into river systems including the Indus, Ganges, Yangtze, Irrawaddy and Mekong.

The assessment said that the impact of the melting could range from flooding from the increased runoff to increased air pollution from black carbon and dust deposited on the glaciers.

All the countries affected need to prioritize tackling this upcoming problem before it reaches crisis proportions,

About 250 million people live in the mountains and 1.65 billion people in river valleys below.

Changes in river flows could also harm hydropower production and cause more erosion and landslides in the mountains.

But more research is needed to gauge exactly how glaciers affect distant crops, said Wouter Buytaert, of Imperial College in London, who was not involved in the study.

“While glacier meltwater propagates downstream, it mixes with water from other sources such as direct rainfall, wetlands, and groundwater, up to a point where the impact of glacier melting may become negligible,” he said.

Saleemul Huq, director of the International Center for Climate Change and Development, an environmental research centre in Dhaka, described the findings of the report as “very alarming,” especially for downstream nations such as Bangladesh.

“All the countries affected need to prioritize tackling this upcoming problem before it reaches crisis proportions,” he said in an email. Huq was one of the study’s external reviewers.