A project funded by NERC (Natural Environment Research Council) and DFID (Department for International Development) under the UK SHEAR (Science for Humanitarian Emergencies and Resilience) programme (grant number NE/P000452/1)
During November 2017, a team of nine Landslide EVO researchers from Imperial College London, Wageningen University, the University of Birmingham and Practical Action Consulting met in Nepal for field activities including site selection, community consultation and sensor testing.
Water science is not an obvious discipline for the use of citizen science – the participation of non-professional scientists in research projects – because many measurements are highly complex and technologically demanding. Yet non-scientist local stakeholders have always played an important role in managing risk, and building resilience against, natural disasters such as flooding and droughts.
The project kickoff meeting was held on 14-15 March 2017 at the Shangri-La Hotel, Kathmandu. The meeting brought over 20 project investigators and partners together for the first time to re-appraise the project objectives, exchange ideas on the use of existing research tools, discuss project coordination, and agree on short-term commitments. One main outcome of the meeting was to identify an immediate need for a common theoretical methodological framework across all four Work Packages. On 16 March, the first project stakeholder workshop followed, which was a great success.
The project has recently started, so for now there is not much to be found on the site yet, but we have big plans. More formally, here are the aims of the project: To employ a bottom-up, participatory approach to increase resilience to hydrologically induced landslide and flood hazards in mountainous Western Nepal, leveraging advances in in-situ/remote monitoring, vulnerability assessment, and polycentric risk governance, to co-generate locally actionable knowledge and tools for disaster risk reduction and resilience building.