Making Local Water Planning Gender and Socially Inclusive: Towards Gender Inclusive Water Sector Development

A crucial natural resource, water plays a multi-faceted role in the lives of rural residents in Nepal. However, climate change threatens to disturb that relationship as variations in temperature, rainfall, and rainfall patterns are affecting water availability. Thus, water scarcity has become an increasingly challenging issue, oftentimes leading to conflict, which leads to excess workloads for everyone. In situations like these, power differentials between men and women as well as different social groups can unduly influence decision-making processes around water

SANDEE – capacity building in South Asia : narrative report, January 01, 2012 - December 31, 2012

South Asian Network for Development and Environmental Economics (SANDEE) operates activities in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Nepal, India and the Maldives, bringing together analysts from across South Asia to address environmental and development issues. This narrative report highlights some of SANDEE’s achievements and activities for the year 2012: climate change research grants show that studies of impact analyses and mitigation instruments dominate the portfolio; a cluster of research grants related to conservation expenditures, costs and triggers, relate particularly to conservation corridors; as well, SANDEE trained nearly 232 participants on a range of issues during 2012

Rangelands, conflicts, and society in the Upper Mustang Region, Nepal

Rangelands are considered critical ecosystems in the Nepal Himalayas and provide multiple ecosystem services that support local livelihoods. However, these rangelands are under threat from various anthropogenic stresses. This study analyzes an example of conflict over the use of rangeland, involving two villages in the Mustang district of Nepal. This prolonged conflict over the use of rangeland rests on how use rights are defined by the parties, that is, whether they are based on traditional use or property ownership. Traditionally, such conflicts in remote areas were managed under the Mukhiya (village chief) system, but this became dysfunctional after the political change of 1990. The continuing conflict suggests that excessive demand for limited rangelands motivates local villagers to gain absolute control of the resources. In such contexts, external support should focus on enhancing the management and production of forage resources locally, which requires the establishment of local common property institutions to facilitate sustainable rangeland management.<br /

Contrasting geometric and dynamic evolution of lake and land-terminating glaciers in the central Himalaya

The impact of glacial lake development on the evolution of glaciers in the Himalaya is poorly quantified, despite the increasing prevalence of supraglacial and proglacial water bodies throughout the region. In this study we examine changes in the geometry, velocity and surface elevation of nine lake-terminating and nine land-terminating glaciers in the Everest region of the central Himalaya over the time period 2000 to 2015. The land-terminating glaciers we examined all decelerated (mean velocity change of −0.16 to −5.60 m a‾¹ for different glaciers), thinned most in their middle reaches, and developed a more gently sloping surface (−0.02 to −0.37° change) down-glacier over the period 2000–2015. The lake-terminating glaciers we examined all retreated (0.46 to 1.42 km), became steeper (0.04 to 8.68° change), and showed maximum thinning towards their termini, but differed in terms of their dynamics, with one group of glaciers accelerating (mean speed-up of 0.18 to 8.04 m a‾¹) and the other decelerating (mean slow-down of −0.36 m a−1 to −8.68 m a‾¹). We suggest that these two scenarios of glacier evolution each represent a different phase of glacial lake expansion; one that is accompanied by increasingly dynamic glacier behaviour and retreat, and a phase where glacial lakes have little impact on glacier behaviour that may precede or follow the phase of active retreat. Our observations are important because they quantify the interaction of glacial lake expansion with glacier ice mass loss, and show that increased glacier recession should be expected where a glacial lake has begun to develop

Threats of Zika virus transmission for Asia and its Hindu-Kush Himalayan region

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.No specific funding was received for this research. However, the work of RM, UK and DAG was funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany (BMBF) under the project AECO (number 01Kl1717) as part of the National Research Network on Zoonotic Infectious Diseases of Germany