Climate change and multiple stressors in high mountain areas. Vulnerability, adaptive capacity and human security in Nager (Karakoram), Pakistan.

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The high mountains of South and Central Asia are among the areas most exposed to the effects of global warming, where small changes in climatic conditions can result in significant changes in local living conditions. Yet, beyond these general insights, a research gap remains on how climate change related risks manifest socially in specific local contexts. As a result, climate change research often relies on simplified assumptions, neglecting the complexity and dynamics of social systems and disregarding other social, political and economic stressors that, in local circumstances, might be more severe than climatic changes. The research project builds on social science approaches at the nexus of climate change and human security and focuses on the Karakoram Mountains of Pakistan - a region that has received only scant attention when focusing on the social consequences of climate change. A detailed empirical study will be conducted in Nager, a high mountain oasis where predominant livelihood strategies largely rely on practises of combined mountain agriculture in a fragile environment. The project aims to better understand the significance of climate change-related risks for the livelihoods and human security of local populations by considering climate change as only one of several concurring processes of local change. By identifying and analysing the causal relationships between complex and multiscalar socio-economic, political-historical and climatic changes, and actual risks on the household level, we intend to determine the significance of these processes from a local and holistic perspective. For this purpose, a modular and multi-method research framework is developed that involves extensive field work in several villages of Nager. Accounting for the lack of local climate data, changes in climate and related risks will be estimated by assessing local perceptions and analysing various other proxy indicators. Social, economic and political processes and their attendant risks will be investigated on a regional and village scale by conducting participatory research methods, expert interviews and analysing secondary data sources. Furthermore, we assess local risk perceptions as well as individual adaptive strategies and capacities to cope with climatic, socio-economic and other stressors in detailed, semi-structured household interviews. The research project contributes to fill a regional research gap and intends to develop and field-test an analytical toolbox to operationalise the predominantly theoretical approaches aiming to explore the nexus of climate change in the context of multiple insecurities. By taking a people-centred approach, we aim at contributing to an evolving social science discourse in the natural science-dominated research field on the effects of climate change in the Global South.