Solid Waste and Water Quality Management Models for Sagarmatha National Park and Buffer Zone, Nepal

Manfredi, Emanuela Chiara; Flury, Bastian; Viviano, Gaetano; Thakuri, Sudeep; Khanal, Sanjay Nath; Jha, Pramod Kumar; Maskey, Ramesh Kumar; Kayastha, Rijan Bhakta; Kafle, Kumud Raj; Bhochhibhoya, Silu; Ghimire, Narayan Prasad; Shrestha, Bharat Babu; Chaudhary, Gyanendra; Giannino, Francesco; Cartenì, Fabrizio; Mazzoleni, Stefano; Salerno, Franco

doi:10.1659/mrd-journal-d-10-00028.1

Cited by 69 publications

(59 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…Trekking represents the biggest threat to Bhutan's environment. Nepal's experience is particularly notable given the deforestation, trail erosion, contamination of water, and solid waste problems arising from tourist trekkers [41][42][43][44]. Bhutan's relatively small number of high paying tourists combined with strong regulations around garbage and fuel wood have helped avoid this problem.…”

Section: Tourism Policy Outcomesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural Values and Sustainable Tourism Governance in Bhutan

Schroeder

2015

Sustainability

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Abstract:Governance is recognized as a means to promote sustainable outcomes by democratizing the policy process and potentially harmonizing competing policy interests. This is particularly critical for sustainable tourism policy with its multiple sectors and multiple stakeholders at multiple scales. Yet little is known about the kinds of governance processes and instruments that are able to effectively harmonize competing power interests to better balance economic, ecological, and social concerns. This study analyzes the case of Bhutan and its Gross National Happiness (GNH) strategy as it is applied to sustainable tourism policy. Based on semi-structured interviews and focus groups with 57 state and non-state governance actors, it explores whether Bhutan's unique GNH governance framework successfully harmonizes competing interests in the pursuit of sustainable tourism policy. It argues that the implementation of Bhutanese tourism policy is characterized by diverse and unexpected applications of power by multiple policy stakeholders. These complex power dynamics are not shaped in a meaningful way by the GNH governance instruments. Nor are they rooted in a common understanding of GNH itself. While this situation should subvert sustainable tourism policy, a commitment among state and non-state governance actors to a common set of Buddhist-infused cultural values shapes and constrains policy actions in a manner that promotes sustainable tourism outcomes.

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Section: Tourism Policy Outcomesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural Values and Sustainable Tourism Governance in Bhutan

Schroeder

2015

Sustainability

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“…For stakeholder involvement in spatial modeling, new computational approaches ask either for modular approaches with an intuitive model set-up such as in the agent-based models CORMAS (Etienne et al 2003) or SAMBA-GIS (Castella et al 2005) or in the dynamic models of Bajracharya et al (2010), Lippe et al (2011), andManfredi et al (2010), or for a probabilistic framework such as Bayesian networks (BN), which are known to allow taking into account simultaneously quantitative data and expert knowledge. A key feature of BN is the probabilistic representation of the interactions of model variables allowing on one hand to picture the explicit relationships between the variables of the models, thus facilitating communication to decision makers (Pearl 1988, Jensen 2001.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integrating Expert Knowledge into Mapping Ecosystem Services Trade-offs for Sustainable Forest Management

Grêt‐Regamey¹,

Brunner²,

Altwegg³

et al. 2013

E&S

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ABSTRACT. Mountain ecosystems are highly sensitive to global change. In fact, the continued capacity of mountain regions to provide goods and services to society is threatened by the impact of environmental changes on ecosystems. Although mapping ecosystem services values is known to support sustainable resource management, the integration of spatially explicit local expert knowledge on ecosystem dynamics and social responses to global changes has not yet been integrated in the modeling process. This contribution demonstrates the importance of integrating local knowledge into the spatially explicit valuation of ecosystem services. Knowledge acquired by expert surveys flows into a GIS-based Bayesian Network for valuing forest ecosystem services under a land-use and a climate change scenario in a case study in the Swiss Alps. Results show that including expert knowledge in ecosystem services mapping not only reduces uncertainties considerably, but also has an important effect on the ecosystem services values. Particularly the iterative process between integrating expert knowledge into the modeling process and mapping ecosystem services guarantees a continuous improvement of ecosystem services values maps while opening a new way for mutual learning between scientists and stakeholders which might support adaptive resource management.

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“…Residents obtain water from backyard tube wells and private tankers as well. Water quality in the Nepalese middle hills is affected by sewage and agricultural run-off [27]. While changes in forest cover are more noticeably tied to increased precipitation and water availability at larger scales [28], they can also affect the local water supply.…”

Section: Study Areamentioning

confidence: 99%

Financing Watershed Services in the Foothills of the Himalayas

Kumar

Shyamsundar

Nepal

et al. 2018

Water

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Watershed management is critical for the sustainable supply of clean water to urban centers, particularly in areas of developing countries where large-scale infrastructure projects are costly to implement. In this paper, we discuss the potential for financing improvements in watershed services in the foothills of the Himalayas through Payments for Ecosystem Services. Through the use of a choice experiment to disentangle household preferences, we show that downstream water users are interested in improvements in water quality through source water protection. Households in Dharan municipality are willing to finance watershed management to the extent of USD 118,000 per year. These payments can be used to incentivize upstream households to decrease domestic livestock grazing, change agricultural practices and reduce open defecation to improve the drinking water quality and quantity in downstream areas. The estimated cost of these activities is less than $50,000 per year. Through discussions with local stakeholders, we propose a tri-partite institutional structure to facilitate transactions between downstream and upstream communities and to improve watershed services.

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Solid Waste and Water Quality Management Models for Sagarmatha National Park and Buffer Zone, Nepal

Cited by 69 publications

References 31 publications

Cultural Values and Sustainable Tourism Governance in Bhutan

Cultural Values and Sustainable Tourism Governance in Bhutan

Integrating Expert Knowledge into Mapping Ecosystem Services Trade-offs for Sustainable Forest Management

Financing Watershed Services in the Foothills of the Himalayas

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