세종대 세종뮤지엄갤러리 1관, ‘추니박 - 산수 풍경의 기록’ 추니박 기획초대전 개최

The Trump administration abruptly halted financial support for Nepal's landslide and flash flood risk monitoring program, known as SERVIR-HKH, just months after taking office in late 2024. The program, a collaboration between NASA and USAID, utilized advanced satellite data to help vulnerable areas prepare for natural disasters, combat climate change, and ensure food security.

Established in 2005, the project had been operating in South America, the Amazon, Africa, and Nepal's Himalayan region since 2010. However, President Trump's January 2025 executive order to cut all foreign development aid put an end to SERVIR-HKH's funding. The project, which aimed to predict specific events like glacial collapses and provide early warnings, would have allowed residents to better prepare for disasters.

While predicting the exact moment of a landslide's occurrence remains challenging, identifying high-risk areas and preparing for them was possible. Birenendra Bazlacharya, the former project leader, lamented that the funding cut stopped efforts to strengthen the community's ability to understand landslide situations. He also noted that the ground motion detection work, crucial for predicting warnings, was not completed.

The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), which inherited the project's equipment following the sudden halt, now operates it but can only perform river flow monitoring and fire surveillance, unable to create flood maps. Mariano Tescio, a Columbia University geophysicist, criticized the funding decision, stating that reallocating resources from existing projects is never a positive direction.