Impacts of melting glaciers and snowpacks in High Mountain Asia on downstream water and food security

The high mountains of Asia store large volumes of water in their glaciers and snowpacks. Twelve large river basins, fed with meltwater from these mountains, are home to almost 2 billion people. In their floodplains, a significant fraction of the global food is produced (34% and 23% of the global rice and wheat production respectively). This makes the snow and ice in the High Mountains of Asia a very important water reserve on which both water- and food security for a huge population depend.However, the water supply from the mountains faces many threats. Glaciers and snowpacks are melting at unprecedented rates, and large parts of these reserves are likely to disappear by the end of the 21st century. At the same time, the dependence of downstream populations on mountain water resources is increasing, mainly due to increasing water needs, continuing groundwater depletion and changes in (monsoon) precipitation.Agriculture in the predominantly irrigated floodplains in Asia is very intensive, with often 2 or even 3 crops grown per year. In some of these agricultural areas, irrigation water supply is largely depending on the seasonal availability of meltwater. Any changes in meltwater supply could therefore have large impacts on the crop production, but science has only just started understanding the impacts of melting glaciers and snowpacks on food and water security of downstream populations.In this presentation we will look back on our recent work in which we quantified the current en future dependence of downstream crop production on water from the mountains in the Indus and Ganges basins. We also describe remaining challenges, and look ahead to the upcoming (ERC) 3POLE2SEA project,  that aims to quantify these upstream-downstream linkages in all twelve river basins river basins originating from the High Mountains of Asia. We expect that the 12 river basins have very different upstream-downstream dependencies, resulting in different current and future risks for water and food security, and therefore need different responses for effective adaptation. We explain how our research can contribute to making agriculture in one of the largest food producing areas in the world more resilient to changes in the mountains.