Mountain ranges, described as ‘the world’s water towers’, store massive amounts of fresh water in the form of snowpack and glacial ice and sustain environmental and human water demands downstream. Under global warming shrinking glaciers and related hazards affect hydropower production and tourism in Europe. While in the densely populated Central Asian macro-region, changing snow- and glacier-melt patterns have direct impacts on freshwater supply and runoff regimes in different seasons. This leads to increasing stresses in ecosystems and economies. These regions are also threatened by increasingly frequent flash floods caused by extensive snow and ice melt and Glacial Lake Outburst Floods.
GOTHECA-NOCK zooms in on five of such regions in mainland Norway and the Chinese Karakoram to acquire an in-depth understanding of the interplay between the climate system, glacio-hydrological change, local communities and infrastructures through a circular process involving computer modeling, field observations and assessments of community resilience.
It combines natural and social sciences with communication strategies that reach-out to the local stakeholders first to develop a comprehensive risk assessment tool. It aims at translating increasingly accurate projections of freshwater availability and Glacial Lake Outburst Floods into their direct societal impacts. The communication strategy of GOTHECA-NOCK capitalizes on the use of local knowledge to facilitate an immediate transfer of research outputs to the local stakeholders and decision makers as a guide for efficient climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies. This proposal is a pilot study focusing on the development of methodologies for a large-scale implementation across glacierized regions in Europe and Central Asia. It will help both the developed and developing regions that directly depend on glacial melt water to achieve the UN sustainable goals for freshwater management.
