Scaling climate adaptation in the Hindu Kush Himalaya

The Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) are, in the truest sense, the world's water tower. Stretching over 3,500 kilometres across eight countries, the region is home to around 270 million people, while its river systems sustain the water, food, energy, and livelihood security of more than 2.1 billion people living both within and beyond the mountains. Within this broader landscape, the Integrated Climate Adaptation Solutions for the Hindu Kush Himalaya Region (HI-CAS) project focuses on Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Nepal, where changing precipitation patterns, rising temperatures, land-use change, and ecosystem degradation are intensifying climate risks for mountain communities that depend directly on natural resources and climate-sensitive livelihoods.  Rapidly and unequally.

In Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), for instance, eleven recognised ethnic groups including the Chakma, Marma, and Tanchangya make up roughly half the population of the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT). Historically, they depended on ‘jhum’ or shifting cultivation, but shortened fallow cycles, land availability, and erratic monsoons have eroded its viability. With springs reported to be drying in 74% of Nepal's local governments, water scarcity is intensifying and increasing unpaid care and water collection responsibilities for women  to fetch water. And in Bhutan, women make up nearly two-thirds of the agricultural workforce but earn just about half the annual income of their male counterparts. When water, irrigation, and agrobiodiversity systems fail, the costs land on their primary users who have the least role in creating the crisis and the fewest resources to absorb it.

Existing interventions helping these communities adapt often fall into one of three areas: springshed management, which focus on rejuvenating drying mountain water sources through nature-based catchment interventions; renewable energy-powered irrigation, which replaces diesel-dependent pumping with solar-based systems to improve irrigation access; and agrobiodiversity practices, which restore indigenous crop diversity and traditional seed systems whilst supporting livelihoods, nutrition and food security. Putting this into practice, ICIMOD, with funding from Global Affairs Canada, and in partnership with CEAPRED, Arannayk Foundation and Tarayana Foundation have recently launched the Integrated Climate Adaptation Solutions for the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HI-CAS) project.

Where are interventions falling short?

Our baseline assessment for the HI-CAS project examined the current status of these interventions. We found that none of these solutions build resilience at scale and in sustainable ways unless they are understood as interconnected and designed and implemented holistically. And that none can support inclusive climate justice without deliberate attention to gender equality, disability and social inclusion. Power doesn't shift just because the technology does and four dimensions unmask places where exclusion shows up, where gains could stall, or reverse, as the work scales.

Technical training defaults to men because the technology is socially constructed as men's work. While this pattern was noted in solar irrigation technology, it holds wherever access is“open to everyone”. In Bangladesh's CHT, the assessment found that only 1 of 47 participants had ever accessed an agricultural training, and that language and literacy barriers mean information about subsidies and opportunities often does not reach women or is not understood when it does. In Nepal, focus group discussions described long waiting periods for irrigation turns of up to 13 days compressing labour into narrow windows that leave little space for training or participation. And even where governance structures open a door, walking through it takes years: a female Karbari (village chief) in Khagrachari, an outlier in a governance structure dominated by male traditional authorities, noted that it took years to gain the men's trust.

Governance structures that produce tokenism. Water user committees are male dominated by design. When women are present, their roles tend toward administration rather than in decisions over allocations and budgets. Springshed governance that extracts women's maintenance labour while excluding them from authority over water allocation reproduces inequality even when it delivers ecological outcomes. In Bhutan, the same pattern holds in community forestry structures linked to springshed protection: the presence of women and most disadvantaged groups is institutionalised but not their leadership.

Indigenous knowledge unrecognised and undocumented. Women across all three countries play a critical role as custodians of traditional ecological practices, seed diversity and post-harvest management. This knowledge, though directly relevant to agrobiodiversity interventions, remains largely oral, informal, and absent from formal training content. Extension systems that increasingly prioritise uniform commercial crops are eroding intergenerational transmission of knowledge and skills.

Women's economic contribution made invisible. Labour in water collection, spring maintenance, and subsistence farming is categorised by country statistical systems as domestic support rather than economic work. Women receive no compensation, generate no employment records, and accumulate no assets through their adaptation-related contributions. Women remain invisible in the technology systems that increasingly mediate access to productive resources. Control over income and assets remains concentrated with men regardless of who performs the work.

So, what does GESI-responsive scaling require?

Adaptation solutions need certain non-negotiable commitments if outcomes are to benefit the populations who bear the greatest climate burden. We propound three commitments which would anchor this approach:

First, decision-making authority must be shared structurally. Water user groups require co-chairs holding equal authority, not a token deputy seat. That only holds if men engage as allies rather than gatekeepers and how GESI responsive orientation is built into technical delivery rather than bolted on as a separate workstream. Second, every adaptation intervention must demonstrably reduce women's time poverty. This requires baseline time-use surveys and embedded childcare and mobility support from the start. Third, gender-responsive budgeting must apply across all activities, with institutional GESI-responsive codes tracking allocation and expenditure against GESI outcomes at each governance level.

Beyond these non-negotiables though, a second set of actions targets the specific indicators along which climate adaptation either narrows or widens gender gaps, i.e., GESI-analysis and data segregation in feasibility studies, decision-making role in livelihoods, asset ownership and income control, group membership and leadership, and time poverty/workload linked to unpaid care.

Meaningful inclusion and engagement. This requires redesigning how trainings are delivered, not just who attends. Facilitation teams should include women, IPLC knowledge holders, and persons with disabilities. Sessions should run in local languages at care-friendly times. Training content should combine tasks women already lead such as seed management, water scheduling, and post-harvest handling with the skills and access to engage with technology adoption which has historically been male domains.

Equitable distribution of benefits. A role charter system for each user group should set at least 50 percent of overall roles and 30 percent of decision-control roles for women, with rotation rules to prevent elite capture. A community knowledge centre near intervention sites, gender-balanced in staffing and offering onboarding, technical advisory, and safeguarding support, creates a trusted access point that does not depend on male-dominated networks. Women's groups and Indigenous Peoples’ networks must evolve from project participants into accountability actors who can engage with policies, budgets, and implementation processes long before and after programme cycles end.

Social and economic empowerment. Women's adaptation-related labour must be directly compensated at or above local wage rates and paid via mobile money to prevent interception. Indigenous knowledge must be documented, recognized as prior learning (RPL) and integrated into adaptation curricula as climate expertise rather than informal background. Community-level water economics dashboards can normalise women as economic stakeholders rather than service users.

Finally, and in conclusion, governance structures that embed Free, Prior and Informed Consent principles, prevent concentration of decision-making power, and link all user bodies to functional grievance and safeguarding pathways are what will make such change durable. Without them, technically sound climate solutions will deliver uneven benefits and perpetuate layers of exclusion. Populations that carry the greatest climate burden will continue to have the least say in shaping the solutions designed in their name. Once gender-responsive, indigenous-centric practices move beyond individual projects into sub-national plans, policies, and institutional systems, livelihoods and community capacities in the HKH will be better safeguarded.