AdaptAIR: Climate Adaptation through Artificial Ice Reservoirs (AIRs) in the Himalayas

Objective

Shrinking glaciers and more frequent extreme weather events threaten the water security of 55 million people living in the Himalayan Mountain range. Artificial ice reservoirs (AIRs) – annually created stores of ice formed each winter through diverting streams or pumping groundwater into the air – are being rapidly implemented across the northern-most Indian Union Territory of Ladakh. However, the construction of AIRs has been conducted without consideration of the social and environmental context of which they are being placed. This limits the efficacy of AIRs, and mirrors a wider impasse in climate adaptation: critiques provide crucial insights into the limitations and potential harms of new technologies, but lack the required solutions. AdaptAIR combines experts in science and technology studies, critical agrarian studies, anthropology and physical geography to develop a novel framework for implementing AIRs across the Himalayas. This will be achieved through a programme of cross-disciplinary research into the environmental, social, economic and cultural conditions that effect the viability of AIRs in Ladakh. Specifically, we will: (i) understand and contextualise regional climate change in relation to AIRs and livelihoods; (ii) situate AIRs within the cultural and environmental context of glacier recession; (iii) research the hydrological and social impacts of AIRs; (iv) develop and implement a participatory and grounded approach to constructing AIRs. Together, this approach will be used to develop a framework for constructing AIRs across the Himalayas, based on novel theoretical approaches to climate adaptation.