2/18/2025
The Appalachian region in the U.S. and the Hindu-Kush Himalayan region in Asia face similar challenges, particularly in adapting to climate change and building economic resilience. A Kathmandu-based organization called the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) has been at the forefront of addressing these issues, building up knowledge to tackle them. It offers crucial peer learning for mountainous organizations across the globe.
The Hindu-Kush Himalayas Region
In the geological timeframe, the Hindu-Kush Himalayas (HKH) mountain range is one of the youngest in the world. It formed after the mammoth Indo-subcontinent plate initially attached to the African continent, severed, floated northeast across the tectonic oceans, and collided with the Eurasian plate some 50 million years ago. When this epochal event took place, the dinosaurs were still around.
This mountainous range today stretches over seven countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, China, Nepal, Bhutan, and Myanmar. Some of the world’s tallest mountains, such as Mount Everest, known locally as Sagarmatha, are proud constituents of this range.
Source: International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD)
Known as the roof of the world, the Himalayas are also where radical climate change appears first before it hits elsewhere. The region has been witnessing frequent climate change disasters such as flash floods and heavy-rain-induced landslides.
The effects of such disasters are difficult to measure in their entirety since nearly a billion people depend on the mountainous range. Climate change-induced flash floods kill people, destroy roads, and uproot communities. Any changes in the composition, volume, or direction of hundreds of rivers that sprung from the Himalayas can wreak havoc for millions of people living downstream, who depend on them for their livelihood. So important are these rivers to people’s core existence that experts fear that fights for river waters could be the next flashpoint in this nuclear-charged region.
On my way to Kathmandu from Siraha, my hometown, via a windy, Sindhuli Highway in central Nepal, I saw the massive scale of a climate-change-induced devastation. Two months before my visit, a huge flash flood had chopped various sections of the highway built through the Japanese grant. The flash flood obliterated hundreds of communities, killing over 225 people and leaving behind a trail of house debris along this once scenic and thriving corridor.
The Organization: ICIMOD
In this sphere, a Kathmandu-based organization called the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) has been working for the last four decades, promoting understanding of and building knowledge of the region. Besides creating knowledge, the organization also takes on the responsibility of a convener in the region that already boasts vast heterogeneity across cultural, societal, and institutional lines.
ICIMOD’s Headquarters office in Lalitpur, Nepal
I had the opportunity to sit down with some of ICIMOD’s researchers and learn from them about the organization and their research, while also sharing some of our ongoing economic research. The two organizations and the regions, despite their orientations on two different continents, have some overlaps. Both organizations focus on the people in the mountainous range and work to promote economic resiliency. Similarly, both regions are also vulnerable to climate change–one latest example being a flood ripping through North Carolina’s Appalachian region.
An attachment on the wall
ICIMOD works to promote economic resilience across eight diverse countries with varying political, social, and economic systems. Unlike the U.S. with a uniform commercial backdrop, the HKH region faces challenges due to the absence of unified markets or aggregation systems.
The organization focuses on local strengths and niche markets to build economic resiliency. It works to train communities to capitalize on unique, location-specific products that command premium prices in the international market. It emphasizes “mountain specificity,” or products unique to mountain regions that are not found downstream. Such mountain-specific products would, for example, include pashmina products and churpi (hard cheese).
Meeting with ICIMOD members
However, numerous challenges complicate the expansion of mountain-specific goods. Primarily, heterogeneous economic and policy structures across countries complicate product aggregation. Similarly, sparse populations and infrastructure deficiencies pose input and logistic-level challenges. As a result, even if a regional good is cherished abroad, the region fails to meet large-scale demand.
Whereas the Appalachian Region’s mostly urban areas have a mostly manufacturing-focused economy, the HKH region is predominantly agricultural but increasingly pivoting to service sectors, including tourism. However, none of the countries gather detailed industry-wide employment data, making it difficult to assess the sub-industry strengths or weaknesses of the region to inform any policies.
Apart from promoting economic resilience, ICIMOD’s contributions to creating knowledge on climate change in the region have been second to none with hundreds of research papers. Similarly, with partnerships it has weaved across the region, ICIMOD has also created and tested low-cost disaster mitigation techniques that could, in some cases, offer cost-effective solutions to increasing climate change disasters in the global north.
A year before the flash flood in Nepal, ICIMOD published a 2030 strategy, urging rapid actions to combat climate change in the region. Embedded in the strategy paper were sentences full of premonition: “Even a 1.5°C world is too hot for the HKH because of elevation-dependent warming. A 1.5°C rise will increase the risks of extreme weather events, triggering flash floods, altering agriculture, and causing multiple long-term instabilities.” Those ominous words came true a year later, and in some ways, underscored the valuable studies of ICIMOD.
Areas of Learning: Fighting Climate Change and Growing Economies
ICIMOD’s extensive research in climate change and economic resilience could be beneficial for organizations serving in several mountain ranges. Climate changes affect Global South countries disproportionately. Given their resilience, the Global South has developed knowledge for disaster preparedness and mitigation and has low-cost climate adaptation strategies in place. ICIMOD’s vast knowledge of these strategies could be helpful to numerous US cities.
Similarly, both organizations can work to share knowledge on how they are working to develop economic resilience in the mountainous region. In this regard, ICIMOD’s focus on niche markets could be a useful lesson for Appalachians. More opportunities for knowledge exchange on disaster mitigation and long-term economic resilience strategies could help mountainous people everywhere.