Community Perceptions and Responses to Climate Variability: Insights from the Himalayas
A prerequisite for the formulation of effective adaptation strategies and plans is an in-depth understanding of impacts resultant of climate variability, the measures adopted by communities as a response to such stress and the support needs to reduce vuln
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Abstract A prerequisite for the formulation of effective adaptation strategies and plans is an in-depth understanding of impacts resultant of climate variability, the measures adopted by communities as a response to such stress and the support needs to reduce vulnerabilities arising out of such challenges. A satisfactory, updated information base covering all these aspects is difficult to come by, particularly in the Hindu Kush Himalayan countries, posing serious challenges for any agency tasked with the responsibility of formulating climate change adaptation strategies and plans. To bridge this knowledge gap, an extensive participatory assessment was undertaken in selected districts of Bhutan, India and Nepal, covering 90 villages spanning an altitudinal range of 50–3500 MSL. The results of this extensive survey are reported in this chapter, with special focus on perceptions of mountain communities on climate variability, their impacts and the responses of the communities to overcome the resultant stress. Keywords Community perception • Climate variability • Impact assessment • Coping mechanism • Adaptive mechanism
A. Pandit • N.S. Pradhan • D. Choudhury (*) International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), Kathmandu, Nepal e-mail: [email protected] A. Jain Independent Consultant, Mussourie, India R. Singha Resources Centre for Sustainable Development, Byelane 12, Kundilnagar, Guwahati, Assam, India A. Suting Meghalaya Rural Development Society, Shillong, Meghalaya, India S. Jamir West Garo Hills Community Resource Management Project, west Garo Hills, Tura, India © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 N. Salzmann et al. (eds.), Climate Change Adaptation Strategies – An Upstream-downstream Perspective, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40773-9_10
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Introduction
Climate related disasters have been on the increase in the past few years across the Hindu Kush Himalayas (Haque 2003; ICIMOD 2010; Xu et al. 2009) – the long drawn dry spells in many parts of western Nepal and the Indian Himalayan states between 2007 and 2010, followed by the devastating flash floods in Uttarakhand in India (Das 2013; Uniyal 2013), Chitral in Pakistan (Rahman and Khan 2013) and across major parts of western Myanmar in the immediate past. Severe rainfall induced landslides in 2015 in Bandarban, Bangladesh and the Chin state in Myanmar are a few examples of climate induced disasters in the region. These events, together with the increasingly erratic patterns of rainfall in the region, underscore the urgent need for formulating effective adaptation action plans in order to enhance adaptive capacities of mountain communities to cope with stress (Pradhan et al. 2014, 2015). A pre-requisite to effective adaptation strategies and plans, however, is a sufficiently robust information base describing the local impacts of climate variability and the responses of communities to such change – an understanding of impacts and community capabilities to deal with such challenges. Yet, the lack o
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