Increasing the resilience of the hydropower sector in Nepal to climate extremes

About the workshop

In collaboration with the Met Office, the UK’s national meteorological agency, we are organising a two-day workshop for relevant professionals from the hydropower sector in Nepal. Supported by the Asia Regional Resilience to a Changing Climate (ARRCC) programme funded by the UK’s Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, this workshop will focus on sharing information about how climate change is likely to impact the hydropower sector in Nepal. There will be a focus on current and future risks from extreme rainfall in Nepal, as well as understanding how climate information could feed into the decisions made by stakeholders in the hydropower sector. The workshop will bring together creators and users of climate information to work towards increasing resilience to current and future climate change in Nepal.

Objectives

The workshop aims to bring together providers of climate information (ICIMOD and UK Met Office) with users of current and future climate information (stakeholders from the hydropower sector in Nepal). Through interactive sessions, we want to understand and address the challenges that this sector faces and present the climate information we have for Nepal that could be used to help tackle such challenges. Through dialogue, we want to understand how climate information can be most effectively used by the hydropower sector in Nepal in order to increase resilience to current and future climate change.

Expected outcomes

This workshop will foster an understanding of the current risk of extreme rainfall events in Nepal and how these are projected to change in the future based on a range of scenarios of future climate change.

By the end of the workshop, we will be able to:

• Understand how climate information is currently used by stakeholders in the hydropower sector
• Describe the current risk of extreme rainfall events in Nepal
• Explain how climate models work, and what they can tell us about future climate change in Nepal
• Link extreme rainfall to river flow, with an example from the Koshi Basin, and demonstrate how climate information can be integrated into planning, designing, and decision making
• Work together on a climate risk assessment guideline and identify knowledge gaps which need to be addressed

Participation

The workshop is aimed at relevant government and non-government professionals from the hydropower sector in Nepal, including but not limited to policymakers, hydropower owners, investors, and engineers. The workshop is planned to be held in person.

Resource persons

ICIMOD: Saurav Pradhananga, Mandira Singh Shrestha

Met Office: Joseph Daron, Rosie Oakes, Katy Richardson, Hamish Steptoe

Nepal Development Research Institute (NDRI): Divas Basnet,

Background

In September 2019, ICIMOD and the Met Office, the UK’s national meteorological agency, partnered to organise a workshop on climate services for the water and hydropower sectors in South Asia. This workshop, organised under the UK Aid-supported ARRCC programme, brought together climate researchers and providers, boundary organisations, and users of climate information to identify the needs, requirements, and knowledge gaps related to climate information for the water and hydropower sectors in South Asia. The outcomes of the discussion highlighted the need to better understand the current and future risk of extreme rainfall events.

Since then, scientists from ICIMOD and the Met Office have been working together to investigate the current risk of extreme rainfall, and what climate models can tell us about how this may change in the future. We have also developed a method to present current and future extreme rainfall in the context of a drainage basin to make the data more relevant to hydropower stakeholders.

This workshop, planned for July 2022, will give us the opportunity to reconnect with stakeholders in Nepal and present the outcomes of the work we have done. We would like to have discussions with stakeholders to understand more about the decisions that they are making so we can deliver climate information in a way that is useful and usable to inform decision-making.

Tentative agenda

Rapporteurs: Divya Laxmi Subedi and Rojeena Haiju, NDRI