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Nepal is located on the southern slope of the Central Himalayas and has experienced frequent droughts in the past. In this study, we used an ensemble of 13 biased corrected models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) to assess the future drought conditions over Nepal under three shared socioeconomic pathways (SSP126, SSP245, and SSP585) using the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) at annual timescale. The monthly correlation between observed and CMIP6-simulated historical SPEI is 0.23 (p < 0.01), which indicates the CMIP6 model ensemble can simulate the drought characteristics over Nepal. In the future period (2020–2100), the duration and severity of droughts are projected to increase with higher emission scenarios, especially for SSP585. Our results indicate enhanced drought intensity under SSP126, whereas, under SSP245, the drought frequency will be slightly higher. The drought frequency is projected to increase in the early future (2020–2060), decreasing in the late future (2061–2100) under all SSP scenarios. The results further indicate more prolonged and severe droughts in the early future under SSP585 as compared to SSP126 and SSP245. The findings of the present study can help drought mitigation as well as long-term adaptation strategies over Nepal.

Lexical bundles (LBs) are indispensable building blocks and essential constituents of academic discourse. The appropriate utilization of the lexical bundle's approach can effectively enhance students' understanding of academic discourse. LBs in various academic genres have extensively been studied concerning written and spoken language. However, less research has been conducted to explore the occurrence, nature, and frequency of LBs in Pakistani academic discourse, especially in textbooks. Therefore, the present study aims to explore four-word common LBs and their functional taxonomies employed in Pakistani Higher Secondary School Certificate (HSSC) level textbooks of Chemistry and Physics. A specialized corpus of these textbooks was built which was run on Antconc software for the identification and extraction of the LBs in the corpus. The classification of the identified LBs was then carried out utilizing Biber functional taxonomies of LBs. The study found 102 LBs occurring in the selected textbooks. In functional categories, there was a dominant use of discourse organizers and referential expressions. The findings related to frequent strings of words which can have significant educational implications for teachers, language material developers, and syllabus designers. The list of LBs with discourse functions provided by this study can significantly be used to enhance students' academic writing and their ability to comprehend different types of scientific texts.