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TRANSBOUNDARY WATER MANAGEMENTis not harnessed. While touted by some as an important ‘passport outof poverty’ in the face of rising energy demands and fossil fuel prices,green hydropower development remains controversial and contested inthe region, partly because of lack of knowledge of risks due to environmentalchange such as glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) ormeltwater change; concerns about impacts on the water regime (suchas downstream water availability) and on fisheries, livelihoods, aquaticecosystems and environmental services as a whole; and unresolvedmechanisms of benefit sharing. At the regional level, hydropowerprojects raise new questions about sharing transboundary waterresources between countries, which has long been a source of dispute.Yet the ferocity of the debate around hydropower development shouldnot defeat efforts to understand how development trajectories mightreallocate regional land and water resources, incomes and risks, and thevarious consequences for different social groups in time and space. Thechallenge is largely to address the question of how different countriescan initiate and sustain coordinated and collaborative actions to harnesshydropower. This will require attention to the structure and interrelationshipsof organizations, sharing of strategies, and a sophisticatedmonitoring, communication and coordination mechanism.Thus it is clear that regional cooperation requires both anadequate understanding of the potential hydro-economic benefitsand a governance framework for extensive regional engagement forwater resources management to overcome national or bilateral interestsand address shared concerns in a concerted manner.The notion of regional cooperation to ensure sustainable and equitableuse of natural resources is not new. Regional strategic politicaland economic processes offer opportunities to link water managementto emerging regional economic, energy and food securityissues. Indeed the heads of state of the South Asian Association forRegional Cooperation at successive summits have reiterated the needto strengthen and intensify regional cooperation to preserve, protectand manage the diverse and fragile ecosystems of South Asia, and toaddress the challenges posed by climate change and natural disasters.The countries of the HKH region have had some success in sharingreal-time hydrological data, primarily through bilateral agreements,and this has proved useful in flood forecasting. However, achievementshave been limited with regard to the sharing of real-time dataand information on a regional scale, so critical for flood management.Water cooperation has often been hindered by the lack of a soundknowledge base on the availability of resources and their distributionover space and time, and a lack of understanding on the impacts ofvarious drivers of change on the supply of and demand for resources– for example, the impacts of climate change on stream flow variability,sedimentation and potential GLOF events. Regional hubs suchas the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development(ICIMOD) – whose members are the eight countries of the HinduKush Himalayan region (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China,India, Myanmar, Nepal and Pakistan) – can promote collaborationamong knowledge institutions in the region and contribute to thedevelopment of the requisite knowledge and understanding. Suchregional centres can also facilitate representation and participationand provide technical support for regional discussions. Over the pastthree decades, ICIMOD has provided a common platform for regionalcooperation where policy makers, experts, planners and practitionersexchange scientific data, information, ideas and perspectives towardsachieving common solutions at regional levels. Water issues, along withconcerns of livelihoods and ecosystems, are integrated across ICIMOD’sregional programmes addressing adaptation to change, transboundarylandscapes, river basins, cryosphere and atmosphere, andregional information collection and sharing. ICIMOD alsosupports transboundary collaborative research among itsregional member countries through its projects. Suchregional initiatives could be further strengthened throughestablishment of an adequately mandated regional groupor body, hosted by a relevant organization, to independentlyfacilitate and coordinate regional dialogue andstrategic processes of regional water governance.At the river basin level, where externalities are unidirectionalfrom upstream to downstream, early successin regional cooperation can be achieved by identifyingpriority actions expected to provide common benefitsacross borders, for example hazard risk reduction. Thenon-structural flood management approach of providingend-to-end flood forecasting and warning services hasthe greatest potential for regional cooperation. Greatersharing of knowledge on the cryosphere is another areaof potential cooperation that could improve understandingof cryosphere dynamics and possible downstreamimpacts. This is especially important for river basinshighly dependent on meltwater.Regional cooperation may also provide importantopportunities for overcoming the economic, environmental,technological, financial and institutional barriersto hydropower development. Power trade and exchangebetween the Himalayan region and the core industrial beltsof China and India could improve the capacity utilizationfactor of the power plants in the region, thus enabling thecountries to supply power to their households at affordableprices. To enable the less industrialized countries inthe region to trade power with the more industrializedones, cross-border grid interconnections are vital.In this regard there have been positive experiencesin the region. Bhutan and India have engaged in somebilateral cooperation in developing hydropower.Construction companies in China and India have richexperience in hydropower development. Power gridinterconnections in India were expanded from the localand provincial levels to the regional and national levelsin the 1990s, facilitating cross-border interconnectionsto the grid networks. Furthermore, India has promotedthe establishment of power trading companies, bothpublic and private. More recently, electricity exchangemarkets have also been started in India.Another entry point for cooperation may lie in transformingnatural systems of water storage. The region isblessed with a host of such systems including snow coverand permafrost, glacial lakes, wetlands and groundwateraquifers. Transforming natural systems into planned activesystems may have important externalities for downstreamusers including control of uncertain river flows, rechargingof groundwater aquifers, sediment trapping, nutrientrecycling and maintenance of the quality and quantityof the water cycle. However, the cost is high relative toreturns, and the externalities are typically undervaluedand not compensated. The introduction of policies forcompensation for ecosystem services could help mountainpeople maintain healthy lives in a healthy environment[ 68 ]