Local Population in Afghanistan

Photographer Robert Knoth and writer Antoinette de Jong traveled on horseback for weeks around the remote areas of northern Afghanistan where the population was suffering from a severe drought. Climate change and overpopulation are causing erosion and a collapse of the fragile livelihoods for the majority of rural Afghans. The overgrazing and overpopulation are depleting meadows and agricultural lands, making these ever more vulnerable to the changing climate and increasingly extreme weather in the Hindu Kush-Himalayas mountain range. The Hindu Kush-Himalayas serves as water towers tot 1.3 billion people who depend on the glaciers to sustain their ecosystems and as a source of freshwater. The UNEP/World Glacier Monitoring Service estimated that the glacier area in northern Afghanistan decreased by more than 50 percent over the 20th century.