Transboundary flood resilience: Insights from Narayani and Mahakali Basins

Abstract

Floods are natural hazards which do not respect psychological, institutional, regional and national borders based on territorial sovereignty and all the riparian countries get affected by floods. In the rainy season, rivers of Nepal—originating from Himalayas, Chure and other seasonal ones—flood many areas of Nepal and India as these rivers flow through Nepal, India and Bangladesh. The riparian transboundary communities are always at risk and bear huge flood threats and impacts—losses of lives, livestock, property, crops and inundation—during the rainy seasons every year. The frequency and intensity of the floods in the South Asian region has been alarmingly increasing and the transboundary floods have been affecting lives and the livelihoods of millions of the riparian people. In this backdrop, employing qualitative approach, we explored transboundary state-centric cooperation and frameworks; community to community cooperation and framework and the status of early warning system for flood risk management in Narayani-Gandak and Mahakali basins. We investigated four interlinked research questions: 1) Is there any state-centric cooperation for transboundary flood management in the two basins; 2) Is there any community level engagement for transboundary flood management in the two basins; 3) If state-centric and/or transboundary community level transboundary flood management frameworks exist, are there any best practices available for up scaling and scaling out between these basins? 4) What is the current status of early warning system in the basins? We found that transboundary floods, inundation and resilience are issues of serious concerns for both countries yet there is little state-to-state cooperation. The community-to-community cooperation and the status of early warning systems are gradually emerging and the exchange of data for timely communication of floods through flood early warning system is still in nascent stage. We conclude that EWS, coordination of transboundary communities and state to state cooperation are important pillars for making transboundary communities flood and inundation resilient. Therefore, governments, civil society organizations, and even private sectors need to engage both separately and collectively to strengthen absorptive, adaptive and transformative capacities of the flood-prone communities for their resiliency.