Climate Change in Himalaya

The 3-month long assignment has come to the end, but the journey with the Himalayas never ends. Writing this blog is just like a self-paced trekking deep into the Himalayas, along with the magnificent landscape and incredible flora and fauna, the environmental change is also taking place in the Third Pole in recent decades. Natural climate variability and increased human activities are known to have contributed to glacial environment change, forest degradation, floods and GLOFs, landcover and biodiversity loss associated with ecosystem disturbance, which in turn affects the global climate system regulation and leads to vulnerabilities in social-economic developments at many levels. Before it is too late, more attention and actions with precise steps are needed from governments, research institutions, NGOs, local communities, you, me and everyone, to safeguard the Himalayan environment and human well-being. I will keep this blog open for more discoveries along the journey in the Himalay...

So far we have talked about the climate change, biodiversity loss and ecosystem disturbance causing various issues in the Himalayas, these issues need to be closely monitored and studied in order to reduce scientific uncertainty and provide a science-lead analysis for policymakers to address.  The well-known complex terrain in the Himalayas with its high variability of landmass and topography, make the ground monitoring and measurement  less successful, point data  from weather or hydrological station are not good enough to be a representative in certain areas.  Data coverage and quality are of high importance for developing environmental  models, incorrect parameters will result in significant  model error , thereby the cutting-edge geospatial technologies - Remote Sensing & GIS have been applied and funded to bridge the spatial information gap for the Himalayas since  two decades  ago.   By definition,  Remo...