For the next two weeks, this blog will explore popular and niche tourist destinations and how the influx of tourists in these areas have cataclysmic effects on the environment and the people living in it.

Every year, more and more trekkers climb Mount Everest, which results in an accumulating amount of trash and pollution in the area. Due to the time-intensive nature of the climb, trekkers spend weeks on the mountain, generating an estimate of around 8 kilograms of waste, of which majority is discarded on the mountain (National Geographic, 2019). The waste found on the mountain range from empty oxygen canisters to food containers to even human faeces. Furthermore, with global warming causing the snow and ice to melt, garbage that has been buried under the snow would resurface, polluting and posing a serious health risk to the local community who live in the Everest watershed. When the watershed becomes contaminated, the local community’s health is threatened as faeces-contaminated water is known to have caused the spread of waterborne diseases such as Cholera (Oguttu et al., 2017).

Additionally, In 2020, researchers from the University of Plymouth collected eight 900 millilitre samples of stream water and eleven 300 millilitre samples of snow from different points of Mount Everest, discovering the presence of microplastics on all of the snow samples and three of the stream water samples (Charles, 2020). These microplastics are thought to have come from synthetic fibres of which are used to make the clothes and the equipment that the Mount Everest trekkers use (Napper et al., 2020). These microplastics found in stream water samples and snow samples would eventually be directly consumed by the local community, causing dire health issues.

Upon evaluation, there is a sort of environmental injustice played out here, where trekkers who climb Mount Everest are the ones polluting the area, while the local, less represented community living in the Everest Watershed have to bear the consequences. In this regard, we will explore what he Nepalese government have done to combat this environmental injustice and create a discourse to analyse whether the initiatives implemented are sufficient in protecting the health and safety of their people while protecting the environment of the area?

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