A new €10m project will bring together experts to find the most effective place for placing artificial ice reservoirs (AIRS) in the Indian Himalayas to combat the effects of extreme weather events.
Shrinking glaciers and increasingly frequent extreme weather events threaten the water security of 55 million people living in the Himalayan Mountain range. AIRs, which annually create stores of ice formed each winter through diverting streams or pumping groundwater into the air, are being rapidly implemented to help combat the problem.
However, the construction of AIRs has been conducted without social and environmental consideration, limiting their effectiveness.
The AdaptAIR project, co-led by Dr Jeremy Ely from the School of Geography and Planning, will run for six years and combines experts in science and technology studies, critical agrarian studies, anthropology and physical geography to develop a novel framework for implementing AIRs.
This will be achieved through a programme of cross-disciplinary research into the environmental, social, economic and cultural conditions that affect the viability of AIRs in the region.
After assessing the context and impacts of AIRs on their surroundings and the livelihoods of those living in the area, the team will develop and implement a participatory approach to effective construction of the reservoirs, in the hope that this can be rolled out across the Himalayas in the future.
Dr Ely said: “As we continue to burn fossil fuels, our world is getting warmer. This is altering the cycle of our most precious resource, water. We need to cut greenhouse gas emissions to limit the damage, but we also need to adapt to our new warmer world.
“One way people have been adapting to change in the Indian Himalayas is to build AIRs: frozen reservoirs which partly compensate for glacier loss. For climate adaptation technologies like AIRs to have a chance of working, we need to consider not only the changing environment, but also the political, social and economic context in which they are installed. This project is a great opportunity to study how to consider all these factors combine as we continue to adapt to an ever changing climate reality.”
Dr Jeremy Ely, Senior Lecturer in Physical Geography in the School of Geography and Planning, co-leads the project alongside Karine Gagné (University of Guelph), Nithya Natarajan (King's College London) and George Adamson (King's College London). Also among the research team is Senior Lecturer in Climate Science Dr Sihan Li, also of the Sheffield School of Geography and Planning.
The project is funded by a European Research Council Synergy Grant, the first time it has been awarded to the Faculty of Social Sciences at Sheffield.