Glaciers' contributions to people, nature's values, and coping strategies in the Indian Himalaya

. High-altitude regions are highly vulnerable to impacts of climate change because the retreat of glaciers and snow impacts ecosystems, local livelihoods, cultural practices, and values. Although glacier change is widely documented within the natural sciences, limited focus has been given to the lived experiences of emerging challenges in changing glacier environments. We used a mixed methods approach to quantitatively and qualitatively explore and map glaciers' contributions to people and identify patterns of change in the Indian Himalayan Regions of Ladakh and Uttarakhand, as well as local impacts and coping strategies. We found that glacier retreat undermines glaciers' contributions to people, particularly for providing water, but also impacting culture, including spirituality and sense of place, and the environment, including local ecosystems, fauna, and flora. Glaciers were seen by local communities to sustain important instrumental (for food production), relational (for existence), and intrinsic (for biodiversity) values. The ability to diversify livelihoods and purchase power are perceived as important factors to cope with change, and subsistence farmers and herders are identified as vulnerable groups to glacier change. Our findings point to a conceptualization of glaciers not merely as physical entities and indicators of climate change, but also as indicators of the intricate and reciprocal relationships between people, nature, and culture. Operationalizing diverse values of nature in decision making requires acknowledgement of different needs, purposes, capacities, epistemologies, and knowledge systems of multiple actors. Examples show that there are discrepancies between how values of nature are currently framed and how they are manifested and experienced on the ground, which underscore the importance of adopting context-sensitive frameworks.