Paper short abstract:

This proposal considers how environmental data practices and their related infrastructures may constrain the ways in which climate change knowledge is derived, narrativized, and travels in the Third Pole. How do these technoscientific practices map onto community knowledges on the ground?

Paper long 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 proposal seeks to critically examine the role of environmental data and its use in environmental governance in the HMA. Engaging in science and technology studies, it seeks to contextualize environmental data within the infrastructures in which it resides. For example, how do organizations like the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) respond to concerns of the lack of environmental data in the region.

One might consider HMA far from the usual sites of a study on technoscientific practices, in which Silicon Valley or Antarctica may be considered primary producers of technology and climate science. However, it is in a region like HMA where ideas and policies of climate change debated in global scientific communities have deep ramifications for millions of people vulnerable to its impacts living in the high mountains or relying on its resources downstream. The diversity of these communities and the landscapes they inhabit problematize the epistemologies of climate change knowledge production.