The Third Pole

About The Third Pole

The Third Pole is a multilingual journalism platform dedicated to covering climate and ecological issues in the Himalayas and the river basins that originate there. Published at thethirdpole.net, it is a registered non-profit organisation based in New Delhi and London, with editors also working from Kathmandu, Beijing, Dhaka and Karachi. Launched in 2007 as a partnership between Internews' Earth Journalism Network and chinadialogue, the platform has become a primary source of environmental news for the region, with its content regularly republished by outlets across South Asia and beyond. It focuses particularly on water resources and their management, glacial change, energy and the politics of shared rivers. The platform has since been amalgamated with Dialogue Earth, the organisation that succeeded chinadialogue, continuing its mission under the merged entity.

The Third Pole as a place

The platform takes its name from the geographical concept of the Third Pole: the Himalayan-Hindu Kush mountain ranges and the Tibetan Plateau, which form the third-largest store of frozen water on the planet after the Arctic and Antarctic. The region covers some 100,000 square kilometres and holds around 46,000 glaciers. It is a climate-change hotspot whose vast frozen stores of fresh water are of global importance, and ten of Asia's largest rivers begin here, including the Yellow and Yangtze in China, the Irrawaddy in Myanmar, the Ganges flowing through India and Bangladesh, and the transboundary Mekong.

The human stakes of the region's environmental change are enormous. The water flowing from the Third Pole supports an estimated 120 million people directly through irrigation systems and some 1.3 billion people indirectly through river basins across China, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, nearly a fifth of the world's population. Glacial melt affects water security, agriculture, hydropower and disaster risk across the region, making the Third Pole one of the most consequential environmental stories in the world. The platform was created to ensure that this story is reported with rigour, balance and regional cooperation.

Founding and institutional history

The Third Pole was launched in 2007 as a partnership of Internews' Earth Journalism Network and chinadialogue, the London- and Beijing-based environmental journalism organisation. The initiative emerged from chinadialogue's pioneering work on climate dialogue, including its project on the Third Pole in the run-up to the 2009 Kathmandu to Copenhagen conference on South Asian vulnerabilities to global warming. The founding proposition was that the gathering regional crisis around the Himalayan cryosphere required a dedicated forum to inform, discuss and search for solutions.

The platform was established as a registered non-profit organisation based in New Delhi and London, with editors also based in Kathmandu, Beijing, Dhaka and Karachi. This distributed editorial structure reflected the transboundary nature of its subject: the rivers and glaciers it covers cross national borders, and credible reporting on them requires journalists working across the region. The Earth Journalism Network's involvement brought resources for building the reporting capacity of local media, a core part of the project's mission from the outset.

Amalgamation with Dialogue Earth

The Third Pole has been amalgamated with Dialogue Earth, the organisation formed from chinadialogue's evolution. The merger brought the platform's Himalayan and South Asian environmental coverage together with Dialogue Earth's broader global environmental journalism. Under the merged entity, the Third Pole's work continues as a primary news source for environmental issues in the region, maintaining its editorial focus on the mountains, rivers and climate politics of the Hindu Kush Himalaya.

The amalgamation reflects a consolidation in the nonprofit environmental journalism sector, pooling resources and audiences to sustain in-depth reporting. For readers, the practical effect has been continuity: the platform's archives, its network of contributors and its editorial priorities have been preserved within the larger organisation, and its content continues to serve as a source for other outlets in South Asia that republish its stories.

Editorial approach

The Third Pole's journalism is characterised by rigorous research, balanced presentation and a commitment to regional cooperation. From its founding, the project aimed to promote cooperation across the Himalayan region by building the resources and reporting capacity of local media and by publishing balanced, unbiased, rigorously researched news and feature stories. Its network encompasses journalists, policymakers, non-governmental organisations and experts, and it has developed a particular focus on water resources and management in South Asia.

The platform publishes in multiple languages, reflecting the linguistic diversity of the region it covers and its ambition to reach audiences beyond the English-language policy community. Its stories combine scientific findings with on-the-ground reporting, translating research on glaciers, hydrology and climate impacts into narratives accessible to general readers. The emphasis on solutions, on informing discussion and searching for answers to the regional crisis, distinguishes its journalism from purely descriptive environmental reporting.

Coverage: glaciers and the cryosphere

Glacial change is the defining subject of the platform's coverage. Its reporting has tracked the accelerating melt of Himalayan glaciers, the implications for downstream water supplies, and the scientific debates over the pace and consequences of cryospheric change. Stories have examined how urbanisation affects monsoon rainfall patterns in valleys such as Kashmir, raising fears of catastrophic flooding exacerbated by poor urban planning, and how record-breaking heatwaves compound wildfire risks for mountain communities.

The platform's glacial coverage connects scientific research with policy implications. By reporting on studies of glacier retreat, changing precipitation patterns and the risks of glacial lake outburst floods, it provides the evidence base for discussions of adaptation, disaster preparedness and water governance. Its long-running attention to the cryosphere has made it a reference point for journalists and policymakers seeking reliable information on the state of the region's ice.

Coverage: rivers and water management

Water resources and their management form the other central pillar of the platform's journalism. Its reporting covers the politics of shared rivers, the development of hydropower, irrigation challenges and the tensions between upstream and downstream users. Stories have examined how erratic monsoons create water insecurity for farmers, how drought forces difficult sharing decisions, and how large infrastructure projects reshape river systems and the communities that depend on them.

The transboundary dimension of water gives this coverage particular significance. The rivers of the Third Pole cross some of the world's most sensitive borders, and the platform's ability to report from multiple riparian countries allows it to present perspectives rarely found together in national media. Its focus on cooperation, inherited from its founding mission, informs coverage that seeks common ground on shared water challenges rather than amplifying nationalist narratives.

Coverage: energy and climate policy

The platform covers the energy dimensions of the region's environmental challenges, from hydropower development to the pressures that air conditioning demand places on electricity grids during heatwaves. Its reporting examines how climate change drives extreme weather that in turn strains energy systems, creating feedback loops between warming, demand and emissions. Stories have explored the tensions between development needs and environmental protection in energy planning across the Himalayan states.

Climate policy coverage follows national commitments and international negotiations as they affect the region. The platform reports on how countries in the Hindu Kush Himalaya are responding to climate risks, on the financing of adaptation, and on the representation of mountain issues in global climate forums. Its perspective is consistently regional: it assesses policies and negotiations by their consequences for the mountains and the people who live in and below them.

The open data initiative

In a notable extension of its journalism, the Third Pole partnered with the Earth Journalism Network to launch an open-source geospatial database on water issues in the Hindu Kush Himalaya, located at data.thethirdpole.net. The Third Pole Data Network, supported by the Skoll Global Threats Fund, compiled scientific data on water issues from leading organisations monitoring water in Asia, making it available for public use. The initiative was part of a growing movement toward open data on the region's environment, alongside efforts such as the ICIMOD Regional Database Initiative.

The data project reflected the platform's belief that information itself is a tool for cooperation: by making scientific data on Asia's water tower openly accessible, it aimed to support informed decision-making and public understanding. The project's leaders described the publication of the database as a beginning rather than an end, emphasising the real-world application and knowledge value of open data in one of the world's most critical bioregions.

Capacity building and regional cooperation

Building the reporting capacity of local media has been central to the platform's mission since its founding. Through its partnership with the Earth Journalism Network, the project invested in training and resources for journalists across the Himalayan region, recognising that sustained, high-quality environmental reporting requires local reporters with the skills and support to produce it. The network of journalists, policymakers, NGOs and experts that the platform assembled serves as both a source network and a community of practice.

The regional cooperation dimension extends to the platform's role as a source for other media. Outlets across South Asia republish its content regularly, amplifying its reporting beyond its own readership. This syndication function makes the platform an infrastructure for environmental journalism in the region, not only a publication: its stories inform coverage in national media that might otherwise lack the resources for specialised environmental reporting.

Place in environmental journalism

The Third Pole occupies a distinctive position in global environmental journalism as the leading dedicated platform for the Himalayan watershed. Its combination of multilingual publishing, distributed regional editing, scientific rigour and capacity building has few parallels. Within the landscape of nonprofit climate journalism, it represents a regionally focused model: deep, sustained attention to a single critical geography rather than broad global coverage.

Following its amalgamation with Dialogue Earth, the platform continues to serve readers seeking authoritative reporting on the environmental transformation of the world's Third Pole. As glacial melt accelerates and the region's water politics grow more pressing, the demand for the platform's specialised, cooperative journalism is likely to intensify, underscoring the foresight of its 2007 founding mission to create a forum for informing, discussing and seeking solutions to the region's gathering crisis.