The Himalayan region is an important part of South Asia where water plays a crucial role. Ninety percent of water in the region is from three trans-boundary rivers, the Ganges River, the Indus River and the Brahmaputra River.
As a representative river basin in the middle Himalaya, the Kosi River is a trans-boundary river across China, Nepal and India, and is also an important tributary to the River Ganges.With a basin area of 71 500 km2, the Kosi River has the largest elevation drop in the world and covers a broad spectrum of climate, soil, vegetation and socioeconomic zones.
Unfortunately, the basin suffers from multiple water related hazards including glacial lake outburst, debris flow, landslides, flooding, drought, soil erosion and sedimentation. Those hazards could be further exacerbated by the rapid population increase and climate change.
Researcher CHEN Ningsheng of Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IMHE) and his team describes the characteristics of water hazards in the basin, based on the literature review and site investigation covering hydrology, meteorology, geology, geomorphology and socio-economics, and finally proposed a set of mitigating strategies and measures.
They hope this research will draw attention to this region from the international research community and stimulate more activeresearch to deal with the aforementioned natural and anthropogenic problems.
The research observation titled “On the water hazards in the trans-boundary Kosi River basin” was published in Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, 2013 (13):795-808, doi: 10.5194/nhess-13-795-2013.