In an increasingly globalized and interconnected world, where social and environmental change occur ever more rapidly, careful futures-oriented thinking becomes crucial for effective decision making. Foresight activities, including scenario development, quantitative modeling, and scenario-guided design of policies and programs, play a key role in exploring options to address socioeconomic and environmental challenges across many sectors and decision-making levels. We take stock of recent methodological developments in scenario and foresight exercises, seek to provide greater clarity on the many diverse approaches employed, and examine their use by decision makers in different fields and at different geographic, administrative, and temporal scales. Experience shows the importance of clearly formulated questions, structured dialog, carefully designed scenarios, sophisticated biophysical and socioeconomic analysis, and iteration as needed to more effectively link the growing scenarios and foresight community with today's decision makers and to better address the social, economic, and environmental challenges of tomorrow.

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The Hindukush Himalayan region including Nepal, a country reliant on tourism, is particularly sensitive to climate change. However, there are considerable gaps in research regarding tourism and climate change in Nepal. The present research assesses the impact of climate change on tourism in the Manaslu Conservation Area of Nepal. Seventy-six households were interviewed followed by three focus group discussions and five key informant interviews. The empirical data collected at the site are complemented by secondary information on climate and tourism. Local people perceived that temperature and rainfall have been increasing in the study site as a result of climate change. In response to gradually warming temperature and decreasing snowfall, there seems an urgent need for tourism promotional activities in the study area. This would spread the tourist base and increase foreign tourist expenditure in Nepal.

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Wage discrimination in formal and informal sectors is one of the pressing issues that might perpetuate uneven livelihood options and human capital formation at household level. This paper analyzes on what determines whether a person works in informal sector. It also gauzes the degree of wage discrimination in formal and informal sectors in Nepal using country representative labor force survey based cross-section data produced by ILO in 2008. It is found that the gender, geography, educational status, marital status, age of the employee and ethnicity of the employee definitely matter whether an individual works in informal or formal sector. These variables need to be considered while formulating social security policies. Since the wages for relatively educated workers are significantly low in informal sector than formal one, it demands a suitable policy intervention to check probable working poverty in Nepal.The Journal of Development and Administrative Studies, Vol. 22, No. 1-2, pp. 37-50, 2014

With continued global expansion of COVID-19 transmission and mounting threat of the disease, the timely analysis of its trend in Nepal and forecasting the potential situation in the country has been deemed necessary. We analyzed the trend, modelling and impact assessment of COVID-19 cases of Nepal from 23rd January 2020 to 30th April 2020 to portray the scenario of COVID-19 after the first phase of lockdown. Exponential smoothing state-space and autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models were constructed to forecast the cases. Susceptible-infectious-recovered (SIR) model was fit to estimate the basic reproduction number (Ro) of COVID-19 in Nepal. There has been increase in the number of cases but the overall growth in COVID-19 was not high. Statistical modelling has shown that COVID-19 cases may continue to increase exponentially in Nepal. The basic reproduction number in Nepal being maintained at low level of 1.08 for the period of 23rd January to 30th April 2020 is an indication of effectiveness of lockdown in containing the COVID-19 spread. The models further suggest that COVID-19 might persist until December 2020 with peak cases in August 2020. On the other hand, basic reproduction number of 1.25 was computed for total cases reported for the 22nd March to 30th April 2020 period implying that COVID-19 may remain for at least for a year in the country. Thus, maintaining social distance and stay home policy with an implementation of strict lockdown in COVID-19 affected district is highly recommended.

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