(Un)Natural Data?: Environmental Data in High Mountain Asia

Keywords: data governance, data infrastructure, high mountain asia, environmental governance
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 60

Abstract

Recent studies have revealed decades of glacial melt in the Hindu Kush Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau (“High Mountain Asia”). A region with a dearth of in-situ environmental data and opaque, fragmented governance, remote sensing data plays a key role in uncovering the region’s environmental concerns. These range from disasters such as flooding and earthquakes that have devastated the region to the glacial melt that impacts local livelihoods and agricultural systems. In this growing environmental discourse surrounding High Mountain Asia (HMA), analogies such as “water towers of Asia” and “Third Pole” have become correspondingly popular.

This paper considers how environmental data practices and their related infrastructures may constrain the ways in which climate change knowledge is derived, narrativized, and travels in High Mountain Asia. Engaging in STS and geographies in science, it seeks to critically examine environmental data and the infrastructures within which it resides. How have environmental data practices in the “Third Pole” transformed what we know about climate knowledge of the region, especially as it has had a long-held reputation as a “blank spot” for data? Using the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), based in Kathmandu, Nepal, as a case study, it seeks to understand how this key institution brokers relationships between environmental scientists and policy-makers across a fragmented region that sustains hundreds of millions of people. This paper shows how those relationships and their related frictions influence the capture, storage and dissemination of environmental data and form the basis for environmental governance.