 My name is Wimbika Sijapati-Pasnet and I'm a social scientist at the Center for International Forestry Research. We are in a village called Nalma and it's in Lamjung district in Nepal. This is a part of a larger research project that C4 is carrying out in collaboration with a number of partners and it's a part of a six-country study and Nepal is one of the country studies. In Nepal, we're exploring the relationship between migration for economic purposes and land use change in different parts of Nepal. This is in the middle hills, but we also have research underway in the Tharai, which is a flatlands and in the mountains, in the high mountains. Basically, migration has a really long history in Nepal. It's been happening for many, many generations. But since the mid-2000s, we've been witnessing a significant rise in migration rates. Pretty much every day, hundreds and hundreds of predominantly male, from both rural and urban Nepal, migrate overseas, mostly to the Gulf, to Malaysia and to other destinations for employment purposes and migration is contributing almost 30% of the GDP. In the agriculture, forestry and rural development sector, there's barely any mention about migration at all. So what we wanted to do was to really address this, both knowledge and policy gap and really highlight the significance that migration is happening on a wide range of land uses. We've been able to see the main presence of this place for the first time. The place where everyone is staying, and we can see different areas of this place. Just like in Nepal, there are many places where everyone is staying, there are many places where everyone is going for a foreign job. So there are two main social groups in this village. village, Gurung's who were a Tibetan-Burman ethnic group, and Dalits who were at the lowest rung in the caste hierarchy in Nepal. Basically the Gurung's have been participating in migration for a really long time, you know, more than three, four generations ago they've been going to the British Army, to the Indian Army, and even to the Nepali Army. So now what we are witnessing is like a second generation of migrants. A lot of their families are migrating internally to get better access to health, better access to educational facilities. And the ones who are left behind are exploring a lot more avenues for migration, not just limited to British armies and Indian armies anymore, but also as other workers as far away places as Portugal here. The Dalits in comparison, they were historically brought to the village to work as agricultural laborers for the Gurung's. And they've been very much dependent on agriculture as the main source of livelihood. But they too have been witnessing a rise in mail-out migration, mostly to Qatar and to Saudi and to Malaysia.