The Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) region faces significant risks from climate change, due to its topography and geography, growing population, and political, financial and development status. Extending from Afghanistan to Myanmar, crossing Pakistan, India, China, Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh, the region is a source of twelve major river systems which provide essential resources to nearly two billion people. The risks generated by climate change pose grave and immediate threats to the people of the HKH and the region’s development, biodiversity, and sustainability.
This brief sets out the rationale for strengthening regional resilience to cascading climate risks in the HKH, illustrating the benefits that cooperation and collaboration can achieve. It also explores what a regional cooperation mechanism could consider and advance in policy and practice, proposing a set of potential areas for collaboration to move the discussions from the realm of ambition to action.
Key messages
- In a globalised and interconnected world, the impacts of climate change propagate across national borders and pose risks not only to neighbouring countries but also to those on the other side of the world: we call these cascading climate risks.
- Different types of cascading climate risks, including those that originate within the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) and those that originate beyond it, have the potential to severely threaten the region’s societies, economies, and ecosystems.
- Collaboration and cooperation, bringing together state and non-state actors from multiple countries in the region and beyond, are crucial for achieving effective adaptation to cascading climate risks, beyond adaptation at local and national scales.
- Research indicates that regional cooperation on adaptation to climate change in the HKH has the potential to yield multiple benefits: reducing the costs of climate action, helping overcome national- level resource constraints which limit the scale of ambition and action by state and non-state actors, adding credibility to voluntary climate pledges and targets, and enhancing climate diplomacy.
- Around the world, regional cooperation mechanisms for addressing environmental issues encounter various challenges, including a lack of legitimacy and authority to propose mandatory measures, an absence of management structures and governance instruments to achieve high-level goals, and insufficient guidelines on policy implementation.
- The authors propose the establishment of a regional cooperation mechanism on adaptation to cascading climate risks in the HKH. This mechanism, taking on board lessons from others, could aim to lead and facilitate regional cooperation in four key areas: research, information sharing, and knowledge exchange; cross-scale governance capacity and policy support; climate diplomacy, negotiations, and coalition building; and capacity strengthening, implementation, and finance.
