KATHMANDU — Until the summer of 2024, residents of Rajabahs village in Nepal’s southeastern Madhesh province reeled under a water shortage for more than eight years as wells and springs dried up amid extreme summer heat. “We didn’t even have enough to drink, let alone bathe or wash clothes or irrigate our fields,” farmer Kul Bahadur Adhikari remembered. “We were looking for a solution when we realized that if we could collect water from a spring which provides water during the wet season, in a pond, we can use it in the dry season,” he told Mongabay. As Nepal’s plains face severe drought, communities such as the residents of Rajabahs and the government are increasingly turning to artificial ponds as a nature-based solution for water scarcity amid experts warning that unscientific construction and poor governance could limit their long-term effectiveness. When it rained in the summer of 2024, the village of Rajabahs, with around 83 households, collected water in a government-funded $15,000 pond covering an area of 4,740 square meters (51,030 square feet). The following dry season, they could not only draw water from the pond to irrigate their corn and paddy fields, but each household could also draw around 70 liters (18.5 gallons) of drinking water from their hand pump every day. “We didn’t feel any scarcity of water even as the whole of Madhesh province was impacted by a drought this year,” said Shiva Kumar Rana, a member of the Markaura Community Forest in Rajabahs, Mahottari. The “slow…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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