Welcome to the Eastern Himalayas Biodiversity and Climate Change Adaptation (EHBCCA) website – an interactive platform for knowledge sharing and information exchange among ICIMOD, associated project partners, and wider audiences across the world.

The website provides information on the MacArthur Foundation funded project ‘Biodiversity and Climate Change Adaptation in the Eastern Himalayas’. It also serves as a repository of information and knowledge products on biodiversity and climate change adaptation from all the earlier MacArthur supported projects in the Eastern Himalayas that were implemented by ICIMOD and its partners in the regional member countries.
The website gives detailed information about the project, highlighting its goals, objectives, methodologies adopted for research, and the activities implemented by the partners, as well as the intended outputs. The content has been extracted from partners’ reports, published documents, research papers, Letters of Agreement, and other web-based resources.

About the Project

The MacArthur Foundation funded project ‘Biodiversity and Climate Change Adaptation in the Eastern Himalayas’ (June 2010 – March 2012) aims to strengthen the knowledge base on the impacts of climate change on ecosystems, on the associated ecosystem services, and on people’s livelihoods and wellbeing, and to identify adaptive mechanisms.

The project aims to improve understanding of climate change impacts on biodiversity, on related ecosystem services, and on adaptation and sustainable development in the Eastern Himalayas, through a comparative assessment in two wetland ecosystems, examining the linkages among:

• the drivers of change, especially climate change and land use/land cover change;
• livelihood dependencies on ecosystem services;
• the potential impacts of the change drivers on people’s livelihoods and ecosystem goods and services.

The two pilot wetland sites are Phobjikha Wetland in Bhutan, and Koshi Tappu Wetland in Nepal. Both sites have links with agriculture, tourism, and species conservation.
Intended results by the end of the project period:

• Enhanced understanding of climate change impacts on biodiversity and related ecosystem services
• Capacity of mountain communities to adapt local practices relating to the use and maintenance of biodiversity and related ecosystem services assessed and improved
• Evidence-based adaptation strategies developed and disseminated to address the long-term impact of climate change on biodiversity-related services
• Communication strategy developed and implemented for improved exchange of information and knowledge towards climate change adaptation

Outcome: The scientific insights from the project will enable national institutions and policy makers to develop interventions for adaptation and to build ecological and socioeconomic resilience to climate change in the Eastern Himalayas, as well as to expand similar approaches to other parts of the region and across the globe.

Background

Counted among the ‘crisis ecoregions’, global 200 ecoregions’, ‘biodiversity hotspots’, and ‘endemic bird areas’, the Eastern Himalayan region, is a place of rich biodiversity. The region’s ecosystems provide valuable goods and services such as water, soil retention, climate regulation, carbon sequestration, and reservoirs of biodiversity including pollinators, natural predators, and other biological resources. It is home to diverse ethnic groups and minority communities who depend on the rich resources of the landscape for their sustenance. These goods and services influence the welfare and survival even of people downstream.

Realising the interdependence of livelihoods and biodiversity, ICIMOD over the past decade has been facilitating the landscape approach to biodiversity management in the Eastern Himalayan region. With strong support from partners in Bhutan, India, and Nepal, ICIMOD facilitated the project ‘Transboundary Biodiversity Management in the Kangchenjunga Landscape’. In 2008, ICIMOD commenced the dialogue for the Brahmaputra Salween landscape (BSL) conservation initiative, collaborating with partners from China, India, and Myanmar. The real starting point was the Tengchong Consultation in May 2009, where the participants identified the need to initiate and promote transboundary biodiversity and cultural conservation, ecosystem management, sustainable development, and climate change adaptation in the BSL and began the process for regional cooperation and the development and enhancement of the regional biodiversity and environmental knowledge base.

In order to build up understanding of the impact of climate change on biodiversity and natural resources in the Eastern Himalayas, ICIMOD conducted a climate change vulnerability assessment of mountain ecosystems between 2007 and 2008. The assessment helped build a regional understanding of climate change scenarios for the Eastern Himalayan region and indicated that the impacts of climate change perceived here have far-reaching consequences for the condition of biodiversity, the downstream services, and people’s livelihoods and wellbeing. The study also elaborated the need to promote ecosystem-based adaptation at the landscape level to build the resilience of both ecosystems and the community.