HKKH Partnership for ecosystem management
www.hkkhpartnership.org
INSTITUTIONAL CONSOLIDATION FOR THE COORDINATED AND INTEGRATED MONITORING OF NATIONAL RESOURCES TOWARDS SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION IN THE HINDU KUSH – KARAKORAM – HIMALAYA
launched at WSSD and being implemented by IUCN along with its executing partners ICIMOD, CESVI and Ev-K²-CNR
THE INITIATIVE
The partnership Initiative represents the willingness of multi-stakeholders in beneficiary countries to jointly tackle the environmental, political and socio-economic vulnerability of the Hindu Kush–Karakorum–Himalaya mountain region, contributing to consolidation of institutional capacity for systemic planning and management at the local, national and regional levels, focusing on poverty reduction and on biodiversity conservation, through policy development and implementation programs in the HKKH region in a longer-term basis.
OBJECTIVES
The Partnership objective is to provide tools and instruments to facilitate the consistency of Provide tools and instruments to facilitate the consistency of various national-level actions in area based planning and management, within the framework of regional level systemic planning and monitoring, including:
- creation of a coordinated system for collection and analysis (monitoring) of natural resource data;
- knowledge about local populations (socioeconomic conditions)
development of participatory, decisional and operational capacities of the beneficiary populations; - transfer of technologies for the systemic management of data to be used by decision makers at a local, national and regional level to improve systemic planning and management of mountain region.
DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS
A Decision Support System (DSS) is a computer aided tool to support systemic land use planning, management and monitoring. It helps to understand and assess the relationships among the various
management issues, enabling policy maker to make informed decisions.
The need to rapidly define evolutionary scenarios is clearly a priority in order to consent development which is able to combine the understandable need for improving the quality of life of local populations with respect for the environment and conservation of cultures and traditions. Understanding the current situation and being able to simulate medium and long term scenarios, necessarily implies performing compared analyses of various factors, both natural (air, water, soil, animals, vegetation, etc.) and socio-economic (education, health, industry, commerce, agriculture, etc.). Such integration of information and comparative analyses can today be performed by use of modern information technologies.
The DSS will be built on a thorough knowledge of the local area, of the environment and of the socio-economic framework. The creation of a Decision Support System on a solid foundation of data and
information of the whole area is clearly fundamental to promote transboundary planning and management on key mountain issues.
PARTNERS
Preliminary activities: GIS project in the Sagarmatha National Park
The Ev-K²-CNR Committee has always sought to maximize the functional application of its research outputs, given the strong link with the territory in which the projects are carried out. Combining expertise and data gathered over a lengthy period of research experience, creation of a GIS (Geographical Information System) was thus identified as a strategic priority. The GIS, comprising the work, images and scientific results collected in the various sectors of Ev-K²-CNR activity, aims to provide the international scientific community with an instrument which can be used as an "interactive data bank", applied also to the management of the Everest National Park. Accordingly, staff training activities for GIS use and implementation are foreseen.
The most important aspect of this GIS is its great potential for management of data coming from various sources and with non-homogeneous formats and contents. With a high degree of flexibility, the GIS project will support researchers in the elaboration of data and allow them to obtain a representation of results in their required format. Such developments are particularly relevant since the degree of information and content they provide is much higher than that of the raw data available before elaboration and integration.
Finally, the value of a GIS depends not only on its intrinsic technical characteristics but also mostly on the quality of the data contained and on the possibility to easily update the database with new and more sophisticated information. This is possible, for example, through the application of mathematical models, such as numerical climate models, which allow information on climate-related effects to be "superimposed" on existing territorial information.
A first attempt to create a GIS for the Khumbu Valley was carried out in the mid-nineties, based on geological, glaciological, limnological, hydrographic and topographic data of the area surrounding the Pyramid. Scarce spatial resolution of existing topographic maps however strongly compromised the quality of the final product. The evolution of satellite survey technologies, new data gathered in the field and the availability of new and more complete topographic maps, will, from now on, allow for creation of a more complete and reliable GIS.
The characteristics of this GIS project also favour a multidisciplinary output, allowing various researchers to introduce their data within a common base set of geographic coordinates, on a single georeferenced map of the area in question.
