Ryan Bartlett: Climate resilience in eastern Himalayas, integrated approaches adaptation strategies

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Glacial Flooding & Disaster Risk Management Knowledge Exchange and Field Training July 11-24, 2013 in Huaraz, Peru HighMountains.org/workshop/peru-2013

Climate resilience in the eastern Himalayas: Integrated approaches to assessing vulnerability and developing adaptation strategies Ryan Bartlett and Sarah Freeman World Wildlife Fund-­‐US Introduction As climate change adaptation has become an increasingly critical global imperative, a number of climate change vulnerability assessment (CCVA) frameworks, methodologies, and decision support tools have emerged for various audiences, from conservation to development and disaster risk reduction. These have, however, been limited in their utility for adaptation practitioners for various reasons: requirements for robust data and high technical capacity; overly broad or fine geographic scales at the national or highly localized levels; and a limited focus on community vulnerability instead of the larger system level vulnerabilities that act as drivers of risk for both humans and wildlife. In this context, WWF is developing its own CCVA framework tailored to the unique socio-­‐ environmental conservation objectives of its priority landscapes. This approach, Flowing Forward (FF), provides a flexible framework for determining climate change vulnerability and identifying adaptation strategies across highly diverse landscapes. It is an integrated approach, emphasizing the role that both natural and sustainably managed systems play in building resilience in social-­‐ecological systems. It was born out of a need for a VA approach to conservation planning that balances conservation and biodiversity objectives with local livelihood needs and tackles two critical challenges in remote land-­‐-­‐ and sea-­‐scapes: a lack of sufficient climate data and a broad diversity of stakeholders and conservation objectives. Flowing Forward was thus developed to synthesize information from multiple, diverse sources and is based on consensus building to promote robust adaptation decisions that increase options in the face of uncertainty. Using the example application of the FF framework in the unique high mountain Chitwan-­‐ Annapurna Landscape (CHAL) of the Gandaki River Basin in the Nepali Eastern Himalayas, this paper briefly highlights how stakeholder and participatory approaches at multiple levels can generate knowledge to fill key information gaps and build consensus on both climate risk and adaptation actions. Flowing Forward Originally developed for the World Bank as policy guidance targeted at the water resource management sector (Quesne, et al., 2010), FF has since evolved through multiple applications in landscapes in Coastal East Africa, the Mekong, and the Eastern Himalayas to


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