An urbanite is driving across Yushu‘s grassland when he hits a yak on the road, demolishing his car and the creature.

He confronts the nomadic Tibetan herdsman, asking: "Why did you lead your yak onto the road? There‘s no grass on the road!"

The nomad thinks for a minute.

He responds: "Why did you drive over my yak? There‘s no pavement on my yak!"

This is a favorite joke in Yushu Tibetan autonomous prefecture, where I started a volunteer group five years ago.

But the jest points to very serious questions about the future that this forum addresses — the Development of Tibet at a New Stage: Innovation, Coordination and Greening, Opening-up and Sharing Development.

It‘s more than simply the collision of the realities of urbanization and rural life — in this case, nomadic.

And it points to solutions.

While Yushu is in Qinghai province, its realities are essentially the same as in most of the Tibet autonomous region.

This is because Tibet and Qinghai‘s western swathe totter atop the same geological construct — the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau that makes the two region‘s names a portmanteau both English and Chinese. (Qingzang Gaoyuan (青藏高原) in Chinese.)

Names crunched together and abridged like the tectonic plates that forge this geological denonym.

Few foreigners realize the poverty and hardships Tibetans have faced —exponentially less so, as the government innovates toward green development — are the result of a treacherous topography.

This is a message China could better share with the world as it becomes progressively transparent.

Tibetans‘ topography is becoming more treacherous by the day, due to climate change.

The melting permafrost is no longer propping up the water table to nourish the grass.

It‘s dying.

Deserts are growing.

Globalization has transformed heaven and Earth.

Over half of Qumalai‘s Qumehe township‘s grasslands had seared into sand by 2013.

The situation has since become starker.

Yushu‘s hinterlands are fundamentally similar to the autonomous region in that it‘s nearly entirely 100 percent ethnic Tibetans.

Extreme altitudes make it snow 10 months a year and growing anything other than grass impossible.

Mountains that portend earthquakes and landslides, while obstructing transportation infrastructure.

Predators such as bears and wolves kill livestock and even threaten humans.

But, urgently, at up to 4,800 meters, the permafrost layer whose melting due to climate change is rapidly expanding desertification threatens every aspect of life.

For every species.

Herding has been restricted. This is necessary. But has left many families without livelihoods.

Parents await the fruition of their children‘s education. But they have no mitigation plans.

Their strategy is to wait until their children can work, typically a decade from now.

Families need transitional occupational mechanisms.

This will require more and greater innovation than other challenges.

Back to the yaks.

Most parents consider them cultural symbols but don‘t want their children to have to endure the cold realities of herding — in any sense.

This is where green innovation comes in.

Our small group started when we donated solar panels.

Linking to the fossil-fuel grid wasn‘t an option. It still isn‘t.

That‘s because of such extreme geological conditions.

You have to leapfrog. But before you can, you must learn how.

Hazardous geology not only propels poverty but also opportunities to innovatively overtake systems taken for granted elsewhere in places where technology — and other innovations — had hardly penetrated years ago.

The solution found in such isolated and sparsely populated places may be well transplanted around the world — even in the densest, most-polluted settlements.

It‘s perhaps ironic a plateau whose inhabitants have contributed about the least to climate change is weathering its fiercest brunt — in every sense.

But it could also propel us toward the solutions for not only the plateau but also for everybody who lives anywhere.

The very geological conditions that make it difficult to access and cause geological hardship could be not solely a source of mediation if not salvation for Qumalai but for all of us.

It will require innovation to create an electricity grid that powers such areas. This has been largely accomplished in Qumalai in the past few years.

I started our volunteer group, StepUp!, half a decade ago after the nomadic students of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau taught me: "Sometimes, the light at the end of the dark tunnel of poverty is the one children can read by at night."

That‘s a guiding beacon of hope for all of us.

If climate change isn‘t resolved or adapted to, there will not only not be any grass on the road in that joke where the urbanite‘s car hits a yak — but also not any along the sides of the road, where prairie has been parched into sand on the plateau.

The pavement may offer as much — or as little — grass as that yak can get.

And that‘s no joking matter.

(Erik Robert Nilsson ,Assistant Director, China Daily Features)