In Nepal’s Madhesh Province, widely known as the nation’s ‘Grain Basket’, an unprecedented monsoon failure in July 2025 has led to a severe drought, disrupting rice transplantation and threatening food security. ICIMOD’s Earth Observation analysis reveals over 40% of rice fields under stress, with potential losses of up to 450,000 metric tons, posing a nationwide economic and food crisis.
Article 13 of the Paris Agreement established the ETF and builds on earlier efforts to make things more transparent and clearer, like the measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) arrangements under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), where countries systematically track, report, and having their climate actions assessed to ensure progress towards their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).
In 2022 – 2023, Nepal achieved a remarkable 4.33 per cent increase in paddy production, churning out 5.72 million metric tons. The images captured by the satellites provided the crucial baseline information that was required to develop this production data. This technology is known as ‘remote sensing-supported crop area mapping ’, and was conducted by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in collaboration with Nepal’s Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Department (MoALD).
The SERVIR Hindu Kush Himalaya (SERVIR-HKH) Initiative of the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) and Nepal’s Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Department (MoALD) have been using remote sensing (RS) and machine learning (ML) techniques to adopt new technologies in food security assessment since 2019.
With the impact of temperature rise on water availability set to compound already high levels of food insecurity in the region, ICIMOD has partnered with the World Food Programme (WFP) to protect vulnerable communities in the region.