Kenyan river basin governance underwent a pioneering reform in the Water Act of 2002, which established new community water-management institutions. This article focuses on community water projects in the Likii Water Resource Users Association in the Upper Ewaso Ng’iro River basin on Mount Kenya, and the extent to which their features are consistent with Ostrom’s design principles of natural resource management. Although the projects have developed solid institutional structures, pressures such as hydroclimatic change, population growth, and water inequality challenge their ability to manage their water resources. Institutional homogeneity across the different water projects and congruence with the design principles is not necessarily a positive factor. Strong differences in household water flows within and among the projects point to the disconnection between apparently successful institutions and their objectives, such as fair and equitable water allocation.

The Key Laboratory of Mountain Hazards and Earth Surface Processes, Chinese Academy of Sciences, is a research institution specializing in the mechanisms of mountain hazards in China and their mitigation, research that is especially relevant to key project construction and environmental protection for Chinese mountain regions. It leads research on mountain hazard mitigation in China.

Knowledge of farmers’ perceptions of and adaptations to climate change is important to inform policies addressing the risk of climate change to farmers. This case study explored those issues in the Melamchi Valley of Nepal through a survey of 365 households and focus group discussions in 6 communities using a Community-Based Risk Screening Tool–Adaptation and Livelihoods (CRiSTAL). Analysis of climate trends in the study area for 1979–2009 showed that mean annual temperatures rose by 1.02°C and the frequency of drought increased measurably after 2003. Farmers reported increases in crop pests, hailstorms, landslides, floods, thunderstorms, and erratic precipitation as climate-related hazards affecting agriculture. They responded in a variety of ways including changing farming practices, selling livestock, milk, and eggs, and engaging in daily wage labor and seasonal labor migration. With more efficient support and planning, some of these measures could be adjusted to better meet current and future risks from climate change.

Small glacier lakes are distributed in the Ladakh Range in northwestern India. This area has experienced several glacier lake outburst floods (GLOFs) since the 1970s, damaging settlements along streams. To reduce GLOF risk through a knowledge-based approach focused on nonstructural measures, we held a workshop in May 2012 for residents of Domkhar Village in the northwestern part of the Ladakh Range. More than 100 villagers participated in the workshop, which conveyed useful disaster information to participants while enabling the researchers to understand local knowledge and beliefs about floods. A survey conducted 3 months later confirmed an improvement in residents’ knowledge of natural disasters. The researchers also learned useful lessons, such as the need to adjust the program design for diverse participants and the importance of clearly communicating disaster risks and supporting local residents’ attempts to incorporate new scientific knowledge into existing local knowledge. Challenges to implementing flood countermeasures in this area included problems relating to land use and emergency communications and the need for coordination of efforts by the government and local residents.

Mountainous rural areas such as those in southwest China are developing rapidly. This requires scientific understanding and a framework for assessing the sustainability of the built environment that is suitable to such areas. At present, no such framework exists. This lack of assessment options has contributed to the unsustainable development of these areas, which has caused a series of environmental, social, and economic problems. This article analyzes existing assessment frameworks, reviews the theory on sustainable rural development as it applies to rural southwest China, and proposes a new assessment framework that is more suitable to this region and others like it. This framework is based on a sustainable development model for rural areas that emphasizes endogenous development; addresses the environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustainability; and takes the natural and social conditions of mountainous rural areas into account. Our study tested its applicability to rural southwest China and its sensitivity to local conditions and found them to be better than those of existing assessment frameworks.

Forests provide direct protection to human settlements from hydrogeomorphic hazards. This paper proposes a method for assessing the effect of natural disturbances on the functionality of direct protection forests (DPFs) in order to prioritize management interventions. We georeferenced disturbance data for wildfires, wind and snow damage, avalanches, and insects and overlaid them to a region-wide DPF map. Within each disturbance polygon, we used a Landsat-5 TM image to identify DPFs with insufficient vegetation cover, by using a maximum likelihood classifier of 6 spectral bands plus 5 vegetation indices. For each disturbance agent, we fitted a generalized linear model of the probability of finding a forested pixel, as a function of topography, time since disturbance, distance from disturbance edge, summer precipitation, and drought in the disturbance year. DPFs covered almost half of total forest area in the study region. Disturbance by insects occurred in more than one sixth of all forests. Avalanche and wildfire occurred each in about one tenth of total forest area, and wind and snow disturbance in only 1%. In the last 50 years, disturbances had a recurrence rate of 3% every 10 years. Almost one sixth of DPFs are currently lacking sufficient forest cover. Wildfires resulted in the highest rate of nonforested pixels (42% of all DPFs), followed by avalanches (21%). Forest recovery was explained by time elapsed, distance from edge (for conifers), and aspect. Summer precipitation and drought had a mixed influence. Our approach to assessing the effect of disturbances on the functionality of DPFs is reproducible in all mountain regions using institutional or open-access geographic data and provides a tool to prioritize DPF management by indicating where restoration of protection is most urgent.

In the Georgian Caucasus, unregulated grazing has damaged grassland vegetation cover and caused erosion. Methods for monitoring and control of affected territories are urgently needed. Focusing on the high-montane and subalpine grasslands of the upper Aragvi Valley, we sampled grassland for soil, rock, and vegetation cover to test the applicability of a site-specific remote-sensing approach to observing grassland degradation. We used random-forest regression to separately estimate vegetation cover from 2 vegetation indices, the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and the Modified Soil Adjusted Vegetation Index (MSAVI₂), derived from multispectral WorldView-2 data (1.8 m). The good model fit of R²  =  0.79 indicates the great potential of a remote-sensing approach for the observation of grassland cover. We used the modeled relationship to produce a vegetation cover map, which showed large areas of grassland degradation.

Bhutan, located in the Himalayas in the South Asian monsoon region, has extremely high variation in elevation, climatic conditions, and land cover despite its small geographical area, as well as great biodiversity. This paper provides the first comprehensive description of climatic conditions in Bhutan. It assesses the spatial variation of temperature and precipitation across the country and evaluates the causes for this variation based on daily data from 70 meteorological stations that have been recording data for time spans ranging from 3 to 21 years. Temperature and precipitation show contrasting spatial variation, with temperature primarily affected by elevation and precipitation by latitude. Models were developed using mixed linear regression models to predict seasonal and annual mean temperature and precipitation based on geographical location. Using linear regression we found that temperatures changed by about 0.5°C for every 100 m of change in elevation, with lapse rates being highest in February, March, and November and lowest from June to August. The lapse rate was highest for minimum temperatures and lowest for maximum temperatures, with the greatest difference during winter. The spatial distribution of precipitation was mainly controlled by latitude, having a quadratic relationship, with the highest rates in the southern foothills of the Himalayan range and the lowest at midlatitudes. The land cover is affected by topography and local climate, with variations in temperature being a main deciding factor for vegetation types; most human settlements and associated land uses are concentrated at lower elevations.

In smallholder farming systems, especially in mountainous areas, households face trade-offs between meeting short-term human needs and ensuring long-term soil productivity. Improved biomass management can help break the downward spiral of overexploitation of natural resources, land degradation, and productivity decline, and support more sustainable use of marginal land. Mixed crop/livestock systems are often carefully balanced to minimize risks. Thus, when planning interventions, profound systems knowledge is crucial. However, the data required for system characterization are often scarce, and original field studies are thus necessary. The aim of this research, a case study in Tajikistan, was to improve systems understanding of the biomass cycle in crop/livestock systems in order to quantify the obstacles to the spread of sustainable land management technologies to farming households. It aimed to establish a database and methods of rapid data collection to quantify the stocks and flows of biomass, with a focus on mass balances, and to evaluate smallholders’ biomass management options and trade-offs. Data collection included household interviews, secondary literature, and reference data sets from global sources. Trade-off analysis focused on household-level self-supply of food, fodder, and fuel by farmers with different sizes of smallholdings, and their potential for on-farm recycling of organic matter. Results indicate that food self-supply by small and medium smallholders is insufficient and fodder sources are scarce. Fodder scarcity means that application of crop byproducts to soils is unlikely. Animal dung is largely used as fuel. Firewood needs exceed on-farm wood production, leading to deforestation. The approach presented facilitates an understanding of current and potential agricultural land interventions in the crop/livestock farming systems prevailing in mountainous areas.

Agropastoral systems in Kyrgyzstan have undergone dramatic change in recent decades. In large part, change has resulted from the introduction of legislation that devolves authority and responsibility for the management of common-pool agropastoral resources to community-level pasture users associations. By applying Ostrom’s principles of common resource governance, this paper analyzes the institutions and norms that currently shape local management practices in rural areas of Naryn Province in Kyrgyzstan and the views of different actors on pasture governance, including points of disagreement. Our research and analysis reveal that the community-initiated and -owned systems of pasture governance that were expected to develop and mature under the new Pasture Law have not yet been entirely realized. Decentralization occurred without the participation or awareness of most local resource users. As a consequence, users are creating and reinforcing their own community-defined practices and internal rules, leaving official management plans largely ignored and unenforced. Resource users tend to perceive the government-sanctioned pasture users associations not as public or democratic organizations that represent their interests, but rather as agencies that aim primarily to control the use of resources, exclude some people from decision-making, or impose taxation. Sustainable management of pasturelands therefore may best be served when community perspectives are more suitably integrated—from the planning phase through to collaborative governance and implementation of locally agreed upon management options.