Narratives of ice loss: New approaches to shrinking glaciers and climate change adaptation

Progress and challenges in glacial lake outburst flood research (2017–2021): a research community perspective

“…4.7), with natural scientists generally driving this research and only at times involving social science or humanities researchers (Harrison et al, 2018;Huggel et al, 2020a;Stuart-Smith et al, 2021) Identified challenges -Better consideration and appreciation of cultural and spiritual values of glacier lakes and high-mountain environments and local and indigenous knowledge in GLOF research (Lambert and Scott, 2019;Abdel-Fattah et al, 2021;Matti and Ögmundardóttir, 2021;Haeberli and Drenkhan, 2022) -More sustained, detailed work needed to understand diverse and intersecting drivers of risk and vulnerabilities in communities (Matti et al, 2022b;see Sect. 4.6) to reveal how societal variables making diverse populations vulnerable overall intertwine with GLOF risks (Carey et al, 2020) -The politics and cultures of GLOF risk management and responses are only partially understood and analysed (Moulton et al, 2021) -Linking GLOF occurrence patterns with anthropogenic climate change signal (Roe et al, 2021;see Sect. 4.7) Proposed ways forward -Recognition and empowerment of (often powerful) local communities and indigenous knowledge (Mercer et al, 2010;Kelman et al, 2012;Carey et al, 2021;see Sect.…”

“…Research on GLOFs has been rapidly growing in recent 2 decades (Emmer, 2018), driven in part by the urgent need to improve understanding trends in GLOF occurrence under climate change and its links to retreating glaciers and the formation of thousands of new lakes globally (Clague and O'Connor, 2015;Harrison et al, 2018;Shugar et al, 2020). At the same time increasing urbanization, land and water demand, migration, mountain tourism, and other socioeconomic and human-related forces exacerbate human exposure and raise vulnerabilities to GLOFs, especially in low-income countries such as Peru or Nepal (Carey, 2010;Sherry et al, 2018;Motschmann et al, 2020a;Sherpa et al, 2020;Carey et al, 2021). However, possible synergies and trade-offs between climate change adaptation (Moulton et al, 2021;Aggarwal et al, 2021), sustainable water use and management (Drenkhan et al, 2019;Haeberli and Drenkhan, 2022), hydropower generation (Schwanghart et al, 2016;Li et al, 2022), glacier protection (Anacona et al, 2018), and GLOF hazard mitigation are still under discussion.…”

The need for stewardship of lands exposed by deglaciation from climate change

“…Mountain areas contribute a relatively small share in food production exports, but they provide a significant amount of subsistence-oriented and local/regional agricultural production from crops and livestock, and also can contribute important runoff to lowland irrigated agriculture (Biemans et al, 2019;Viviroli et al, 2020). Large irrigation and export-oriented agriculture projects are developing in lowland regions (e.g., along the coast of Peru projects like Chinecas and Chavimochic; Bury et al, 2013;Moulton et al, 2021;Vuille et al, 2018), which have created the largest hydrologic demand for agriculture over the past two decades (Bury et al, 2013). Therefore, changes in water provision influence both large scale agricultural production and smallholder agriculture and livelihood, which political and economic factors further exacerbate.…”

“…Meanwhile local and ancestral livelihoods such as agropastoralism or tourism are facing many challenges from cryosphere loss, climatic extremes, external actors, and social tensions (Postigo et al, 2008;Sherry et al, 2018). Therefore, questions of equity, climate justice, power relations, and marginalization are also emerging and need great attention in view of future human adaptation to glacier retreat (Moulton et al, 2021;Skarbø & Vandermolen, 2014). Most resilience studies have until recently emphasized the ecological dimensions and scientific approaches to the biophysical systems, with a lack of attention to social contingency, including power relations, resource conflicts, and cultural factors (Carey et al, 2021).…”

“…External forces-such as energy production, resource extraction (Bury, 2015), market and political pressures (Montaña et al, 2016;Sietz & Feola, 2016), and shifts in water governance (Rasmussen, 2016a)-prevent local adaptation actions and exacerbate the direct effect of glacier shrinkage. Power imbalances are also a limiting factor to local adaptation, favoring the unequal distribution of natural resources between actors and altering risk and vulnerability assessment (Moulton et al, 2021).…”