Himalayan connections: melting glaciers, sacred landscapes and mobile technologies in a changing climate

HimalConnect has investigated knowledge about environmental management and strategies employed in the encounter with natural catastrophes and environmental change in Buddhist societies in Himalaya. Limi in Nepal and Punakha in Bhutan have, during recent years, been hit by environmental catastrophes like floods from melting glaciers (GLOFs) and landslides, at the same time as new infrastructure, communication technology and forms of governance have been introduced. Building on the two case studies, the project has since 2019 investigated how people in the Himalayas understand and manage their natural surroundings historically, and how local environmental management has been influenced by new infrastructure, communication technology and the global discourses about environmental change and sustainable development. One of the project volumes "Cosmopolitical Ecologies Across Asia. Places and Practices of Power in Changing Environments," edited by Kuyakanon, Diemberger and Sneath, was published by Routledge in 2022, and Kuyakanon, Diemberger, Hovden and Havnevik contributed with chapters. Hovden’s monograph, “Limi, the Land In-between: the Art of Governing a Buddhist Frontier Community in the Himalaya” is in print (Brill). HimalConnect's conference "Changing Climate and Communities in High Places and Icy Spaces" was arranged digitally by the University of Oslo 14-15 January 2022. 20 participants from 10 countries, including Bhutan and Nepal, gave presentations discussing empirical data from Hindu-Kush Himalaya, Mongolia, South America and the Arctic theoretically and comparatively. A number of the contributions are being prepared for publication in the second HimalConnect volume edited by Kuyakanon and Havnevik, «Changing Climate and Communities in High Places and Icy Spaces» (OpenBook Publishers, forthcoming). An exhibition entitled “Changing Climate and Communities in High Places and Icy Spaces” was on display at the University Library, UiO, 14 January to 10 March 2022. In July 2022, HimalConnect arranged the roundtable "Changing Climate in Tibetan, Himalayan and Mongolian regions: Adaptive Strategies in Dynamic Social, Ecological and Cosmological Landscapes" at the International Association for Tibetan Studies' (IATS) conference in Prague with 13 researchers participating in the discussion. Project results have also been used in the teaching of BA and MA students at UiO and UiT and in the supervision of PhD students at UiO and the University of Cambridge. In autumn 2022, researchers affiliated with HimalConnect (Diemberger, Kropácek, Rinchen Loden, Sagar Lama, Ramble, and Harrison) carried out fieldwork in Kathmandu, Limi, Humla, Mustang and Ladakh. In the spring of 2023 Kuyakanon did her final fieldwork in Bhutan, rounding up the project’s partnership with the College of Language and Culture Studies at the Royal University of Bhutan. Kuyakanon was employed as researcher at UiO for three months (January to April) 2023 to work on the editing of the second HimalConnect project volume. A policy brief “An indigenous system of resource management in Nepal’s remote trans-Himalaya: Sourcing the capabilities of the Limi community to sustainably manage natural resources» was written in collaboration with our partner institutions to inform development interventions and policies in Nepal, UK and Norway (recommending the integration of pre-existing systems of local rules and regulations underpinned by local perceptions of the landscape and cosmology into national level policy making). The publication of the policy brief in English, Nepali and Tibetan through ICIMOD is imminent (Kathmandu: ICIMOD and HimalConnect). The HimalConnect project has also provided a useful platform for specific interventions, local partnerships and capacity building. The awareness that investment in knowledge transfer, negotiation and adaptation across generations is central to any long-term solution to environmental issue has been reflected in a set of workshops in Limi schools. In October 2022, following suggestions by Limi community representatives, schools were made into an important site of engagement with children and parents providing a specific contribution to local environmental education. The school-focused community engagement has also offered an opportunity to review the impact strategy already developed, adapting it to a changed situation shaped by unanticipated challenges such as the Covid crisis, the closing of the borders with China (having a huge impact on the local economy) and erratic weather conditions. Harnessing the longitudinal perspective on community engagement with environmental hazards it has also provided the basis for future projects focusing not only on Limi but also on similar vulnerable communities in the high Himalayas. Capacity building has been on the mind of the HimalConnect team as they assisted local scholars in applying for funding to support their research in the local heritage.

HimalConnect has responded with high quality interdisciplinary evidence-based research that informs development policies and programmes in response to NORGLOBAL-2’s objectives. We analysed how environmental management has changed as villagers in two high-altitude Himalayan communities in Nepal and Bhutan have met climate change-related catastrophes as well as new connectivities, such as roads and mobile telephone connection. Through text-based research, interviews, and fieldwork we have investigated old and new management strategies and found that these are informed by indigenous cosmologies and Buddhism in combination with empirical knowledge. New roads have brought about changes in subsistence strategies in our main case study in Nepal, from an earlier triangulation of agro-pastoralist adaptation combined with trade and crafts into subsistence farming combined with seasonal low-salaried wage labor. Villagers strongly support new connectivities, as these are needed to facilitate sustainable development, increase institutional resources and funding on local level as well as increase knowledge about climate change and about laws and politics. However, as roads have opened access to border areas in China, a heavy reliance on purchased goods and cash income from manual labour have made villages extremely vulnerable; particularly evident when the border closed due to Covid-19. A series of factors have caused out migration from the high-altitude communities in the Himalayas to urban centres. The push factors are high-risk farming in erratic weather related to climate-change, poor or non-existent health services, and poor-quality grade schools, while pull factors are better educational opportunities, cash income and leisure activities in towns and cities. In two of three villages studied in Nepal, we found an increasing depopulation, gentrification, and feminization. There is a strong need to integrate local knowledge and practices related to resource management in various government levels in Nepal and in Bhutan, but there are linguistic challenges connected with the formulation of new laws, and vocabulary connected with climate change needs to be translated to local and national languages. In order to facilitate communication between the political sector in Nepal and the civil society, including NGOs, and local agents, HimalConnect organised a stakeholder conference in Kathmandu (2019) with representatives from three administrative levels, the civil society, and researchers to discuss water management, traditional natural resource and waste management (ICIMOD 2021). This workshop was partially funded by a spin-off project in the framework of the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) of the University of Cambridge (awarded in 2018). A policy brief was written in collaboration with our partner institutions to inform development interventions and policies in Nepal, UK and Norway.

Through an exceptional confluence of events and access to centuries of historical documents, this project will explore the complexities of environmental perception and decision-making at a pivotal moment of change in a high-altitude community in the Himalaya. Limi in Humla, western Nepal is experiencing repeated glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) at the same time as the advent of new connectivities such as mobile telephony. Through long-term fieldwork the project will document the community's historical mechanisms for environmental management to deal with different scenarios of living in a hazardous environment. These mechanisms will be examined in light of the arrival of new communication technologies and new knowledges and framing discourses around climate change and sustainable development. This longitudinal exploration will combine ethnography with rare access to local historical documentation from the thirteenth century to the present. Methodology developed in the primary site will be tiered out to a secondary case-study site in Aja, Bhutan, to develop a comparative framework. Through a regional workshop drawing on similar case-studies this approach will be further scaled out to develop a methodology for a multi-level analysis that encompasses the complexity of different geographical and temporal scales. An international conference and on-going interaction with scholars working in other remote and vulnerable areas in the world will provide an opportunity to test this approach in a wider perspective. This project's findings will provide ground-breaking contribution to the analysis of Himalayan environmental management, while its novel methodology has the potential to alter how, and the extent to which, in-depth case studies may be scaled out to contribute to regional, national and international level analyses of human-environment interactions in the context of sustainable development, specifically key NORGLOBAL-2 thematic areas and SDG goals.