Monday, February 14, 2011

Preparing blueprint to manage climate change in the Himalayas

The Times of India: The Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) and Aaranyak, a biodiversity conservation group, will work on preparing a roadmap for researches on management of climate change impact and water-induced hazards in the eastern Himalayan region.

Experts from ICIMOD, Aaranyak and the government sector would meet here on Friday for sharing knowledge on preparing the roadmap. There will be sessions for deliberation on climate-induced water hazards in the Brahmaputra basin in the northeast, covering various aspects of adaptation, governance and community-based risk mitigation. Incidentally, the northeast falls in the eastern Himalayan region.

"The climate change scenario in the Greater Himalayan Region will also be a focus at the meet, where knowledge will be shared. Various observations will be made on water-induced hazards in the northeast in perspective of Greater Himalayan region," Partha J Das, the team-leader of ICIMOD-Aaranyak Project, said.

Satellite hydrology expert from ICIMOD, Sagar Ratan Bajracharya, former secretary of water resources department, A P Mitra, agriculture expert Tapan Dutta among others will take part.

ICIMOD is the regional coordinator of the Brahmatwinn Project, which has been looking to issues like capacity building and addressing implications of climate change for water and soil resources management in the Upper Danube and Upper Brahmaputra river basins. As part of Brahmatwinn, the Lasha basin in Tibet, the Wang chu basin in Bhutan and the Brahmaputra in Assam are taken up for integrated water resources management. Four regional partners, including IIT Roorkee, Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research in China and University of Bhutan, are involved in the project.

Brahmaputra River, Shigatse, Tibet, shot by Boqiang Liao, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

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