A Narrative Review of Geospatial Techniques for assessing Climate Change Impacts on Cryosphere, Geo-environmental Hazards and Risks in the Himalayan Region

Geospatial techniques provide an important tool to understand the earth surface processes and its dynamics in space and time. Under the influence of ongoing climate change, the earth surface features and processes have been significantly impacted and modulated. For instance, the glacier and snow cover resources covering the earth surface have been declining significantly during last century in response to climate change. Similarly, the frequency of occurance of natural disasters like landslides have been affected and impeded severely under changing climatic conditions. During recent years extreme weather events like cloudbursts and subsequent flash floods have also been strongly influenced by the climatic changes. Most notably, the Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOFs) have got a greater impetus during recent decades in response to wider glacier thinking and mass wastage giving rise to formation and rapid expansion of critical glacial lakes. As a consequence of the changing climatic regime and the frequent occurrence of multifaceted natural disasters, a huge loss to economy, life and other infrastructural domains have been witnessed during recent years. In this changing environmental scenario, it is very imperative to understand the earth surface features and the processes controlling it’s evolution and dynamics especially in response to changing climate. To this direction, using the readily available geospatial technology with robust tools and freely available high resolution satellite datasets is highly demanding and required. In this study, an extensive literature review has been conducted, to understand the impact of climate change on the dynamics of earth surface features including the snow cover and glaciers, glacial lakes, river flows, and the occurrence of natural disasters particularly the GLOFs and landslides for the Himalayan Region. The work also provides an overview of the role and application of geospatial technologies including the remote sensing, Geographic Information System (GIS) and modelling approaches in studying, monitoring and managing the earth surface processes and natural environmental disasters and it’s associated risks and hazards