Hydrological modelling and their biases: constraints in policy making and sustainable water resources development under changing climate in the Hindukush-Karakoram-Himalayas

The Hindukush-Karakoram-Himalayan (HKH) mountain ranges and highlands of the Tibetan Plateau (TP) contain large mountain glaciers of the world, and nourishes large Asian river basins with significant amounts of snow and glacier melt, thus are susceptible to global warming and climate change. Therefore, precise and accurate policy making and sustainable water resource development are vital to cater for needs of food and power generation of billions of people. Precise and accurate policy making and sustainable water resources development are dependent on the accuracy of hydrological modelling and its future forecasts, though contain inevitable significant uncertainties. Current study discusses
hydrological modelling uncertainties, biases and their causes in the Upper Indus Basin (UIB), which is originating from the HKH-TP region.

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https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/642496-Khan-Hydrological%20Modelling%20and%20their%20biases.pdf

Planetary Guardrails as Policy Guidance for Sustainable Development

Planetary guardrails are science-based suggestions of limiting human-induced changes in the Earth system in order to avoid intolerable effects on ecosystems and human societies. This brief outlines the guardrail concept as developed by the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU, an independent, scientific advisory body to the German federal government), illuminates its crucial relevance for sustainable development, and explains its importance for policy makers. It draws heavily on a recently published WBGU Policy Paper (WBGU 2014).

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https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/616161-%20Haum%20and%20Loose%20-%20Planetary%20Guardrails%20as%20Policy%20Guidance%20for%20Sustainable%20Development.pdf

Integrated simulation models for sustainable agriculture policy design

Despite significant gains over the past decade, rural poverty, food and nutrition insecurity and environmental degradation remain pervasive problems in the developing world. It is estimated that approximately 805 million people worldwide suffer from hunger and approximately 1.4 billion live in extreme poverty (IFAD, 2010).

Developing coherent plans to combat these problems is complicated by the multi-disciplinary, interconnected and complex nature of the systems that must be managed. Therefore, it is imperative that the strategies developed to tackle these issues are based on comprehensive and sound analyses addressing their key dimensions in an integrated manner (UN, 1992; UN, 2000; UN, 2014a; UN, 2014b). The Threshold 21 (T21) simulation model supports such an approach (UNEP, 2014). T21 is an integrated and dynamic planning tool that enables transparent cross-sectoral analyses of the impacts of policies and enables exploration of their long-term consequences on social, economic and environmental development (Pedercini et al, 2010). T21 takes into account interdependency across sectors and is based on the vast collective knowledge gathered in multistakeholder processes. This makes it an effective tool for achieving a collectively shared understanding of problems, structures and solutions thus contributing to policy dialogue (Pedercini, 2005).

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https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/592654-Zuellicha-Integrated%20simulation%20models%20for%20sustainable%20agriculture%20policy%20design.pdf