Dancing with Uncertainty in South Asian Mountains

A powerful exploration of how climate change is turning the mountains of South Asia into landscapes of uncertainty, where communities, ecosystems and institutions struggle to adapt to an unpredictable future.

This book reveals how marginalised communities living in South Asian Mountains are confronting the growing uncertainties of climate change amid fragile ecosystems and often failing policy responses.

This book explores how marginalised communities in the mountains of South Asia are living through the deepening uncertainties exacerbated by the climate crisis and makes four major contributions. First, it demonstrates that uncertainty – marked by a growing sense of uncontrollability and loss of resonance – has become the defining condition of life in the age of anthropogenic climate change. Second, it situates these experiences within the global climate frontier of the South Asian Mountains, where climate change is unfolding, overlying existing uncertainties, with exceptional intensity and consequence. Third, through story-listening and collaborative narrative methods, the book foregrounds Indigenous and local knowledge as vital forms of evidence alongside scientific data. Finally, it challenges dominant policy frameworks by exposing how uncertainty in mountain environments remains poorly understood, inadequately addressed and urgently in need of new approaches.