scholarly journals Adaptation Mechanisms in Agriculture for Climate Change in Nepal

Author(s):  
Mina Nath Paudel

In Nepal, impacts of climate change can be observed in varying levels of climate that are prevalent in diversified topography and vegetation. Broadly speaking, there are impacts of climate change in the Terai lowlands, the mid-hill valleys and mountains, and in the high Himalayas. Nepal is a unique climatic laboratory for studying the impacts of climate change.Sixty-five percent of the Nepalese people engage in agriculture and more than 32% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) comes from it. There are evidences of climate change in frequently changing monsoonal patterns resulting in droughts, floods, landslides, and other unexpected results that impair subsistence agriculture systems in the country. As a result, there is chronic food shortage in remote hills, and in the mountains, and the Terai, the grain bowl of Nepal, has been hit by food shortage. To date, around 3.9 million people have suffered from hunger and poverty. There are reports that major food crops of rice, maize, and wheat production have declined due to changes in monsoon patterns, insurgence of new pests, and decline in soil productivity. Efforts have been initiated to adopt drought and pest tolerant varieties, changes in planting time, and method of plantings as strategies for adaptation to climate change in agriculture. This paper attempts to highlight adaptation as a strategy to address issues of climate changes from the perspective of Nepalese agriculture.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/hn.v11i1.7219 Hydro Nepal Special Issue: Conference Proceedings 2012 pp.81-85

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 217-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephane Hallegatte ◽  
Marianne Fay ◽  
Edward B. Barbier

AbstractBecause their assets and income represent such a small share of national wealth, the impacts of climate change on poor people, even if dramatic, will be largely invisible in aggregate economic statistics such as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Assessing and managing future impacts of climate change on poverty requires different metrics, and specific studies focusing on the vulnerability of poor people. This special issue provides a set of such studies, looking at the exposure and vulnerability of people living in poverty to shocks and stressors that are expected to increase in frequency or intensity due to climate change, such as floods, droughts, heat waves, and impacts on agricultural production and ecosystem services. This introduction summarizes their approach and findings, which support the idea that the link between poverty and climate vulnerability goes both ways: poverty is one major driver of people's vulnerability to climate-related shocks and stressors, and this vulnerability is keeping people in poverty. The paper concludes by identifying priorities for future research.


2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 158-167
Author(s):  
Agata Bator ◽  
Agnieszka Borek

Abstract On the ground that climate change poses a great threat to societies and economies, it became evident for policy makers that attention should be given to the problem of adaptation, i.e. adaptation measures should be undertaken to minimize the adverse impacts of climate change. As the debate on the adverse impacts of climate change advanced at international level, states are taking actions at national, regional and local levels. Along with the increase awareness regarding importance of adaptation, regulations designed to prepare states to strengthen their resilience to climate change, has been developed in climate change treaties. Paris Agreement seems to be the first global agreement which addresses adaptation as one of its key goals and links it with mitigation efforts. The purpose of this article is to discuss the most important regulations and programmes within the regime established by the Framework Convention and the Paris Agreement concerning adaptation to climate change.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 1203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asako Iwami ◽  
Takanori Matsui ◽  
Michinori Kimura ◽  
Kenshi Baba ◽  
Mitsuru Tanaka

As the effects of climate change increase in severity, organizations across the world are attempting to measures to mitigate these effects. In accordance with the Paris Agreement of November 2015, wherein participating nations agreed to restrict the increase in global temperature below 2 °C, Japan has formulated guidelines on creating adaptation plans that can be implemented by local governments. A Climate Change Adaptive Information Platform was also launched to promote understanding and cooperation by sharing information on climate risks. However, the literature on this topic lacks information related to the organization of requirements and challenges faced by municipal administrative officials that formulate adaptation plans. To address these issues, we examined the four municipal forums hosted at Hosei University to encourage administrative needs for new technological ideas in areas such as climate modeling and impact assessment. We used text mining on the transcripts of the various workshops conducted in these forums and attempted to understand the changes in discussions and to extract issues related to the formulation process. The results showed that various topics, such as creating adaptation promotion systems, assessing the impacts of climate change, formulating adaptation plans, communicating with related organizations and stakeholders, developing human resources, and capacity building, were discussed, and a need for information, procedures, and assistance was identified for the formulation of feasible adaptation plans. This study is expected to provide a useful reference to stakeholders involved in framing adaptation plans to mitigate the effects of climate changes, particularly at the municipal level.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 899-921 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nithya Natarajan ◽  
Katherine Brickell ◽  
Laurie Parsons

An emerging body of work has critiqued the concept of climate adaptation, highlighting the structural constraints impeding marginalised communities across the Global South from being able to adapt. This article builds on such work through analysis of debt-bonded brick workers in Cambodia, formerly small farmers. It argues that the detrimental impacts of climate change experienced by farmers-turned-workers across the rural – urban divide is due to their precarity. In doing so, this article draws on a conceptualisation of precarity which recognises it as emerging from the specific political economy of Cambodia, and as something that is neither new, nor confined to conditions of labour alone. As such, in looking to precarity as a means of conceptualising the relations of power which shape impacts of climate change, we advance a ‘climate precarity’ lens as a means of understanding how adaptation to climate change is an issue of power, rooted in a specific geographical context, and mobile over the rural–urban divide.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 647 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo Martinez-Juarez ◽  
Aline Chiabai ◽  
Cristina Suárez ◽  
Sonia Quiroga

Adapting to expected impacts of climate change is a task shared by multiple institutions and individuals, but much of this work falls over local and regional authorities, which has made them experts over the issue. At the same time, adaptation to climate change has been a research interest in different academic fields; while private companies provide research and development efforts on the issue. Views from perspectives may contain common ground and discrepancies, but benefits from the discussion may differ among these three sectors. This study shows the application of collaborative approaches to analyze impacts and adaptation measures at a local level. A stakeholder workshop was held in the city of Bilbao to discuss impacts of climate change and adaptation in the local context of the Basque Country. The contributions were proposed on three axes: impacts from climate change, good practices proposed or already in action, and costs and benefits derived from those strategies. Participants were asked to rank a series of measures and practices extracted from their previous inputs. These measures were analyzed after applying bootstrapping techniques, according to the perceived costs and benefits assigned to each of the grouped measures and practices. Participants estimated that groups containing green adaptation measures and those that had potentially positive impacts over climate change mitigation were the most efficient measures, as reduced costs combined with high benefits could lead to win–win adaptation strategies, while grey infrastructures were seen as providing high benefits at high costs.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haiming Yan ◽  
Jinyan Zhan ◽  
Bing Liu ◽  
Wei Huang ◽  
Zhihui Li

The ecosystem resilience plays a key role in maintaining a steady flow of ecosystem services and enables quick and flexible responses to climate changes, and maintaining or restoring the ecosystem resilience of forests is a necessary societal adaptation to climate change; however, there is a great lack of spatially explicit ecosystem resilience assessments. Drawing on principles of the ecosystem resilience highlighted in the literature, we built on the theory of dissipative structures to develop a conceptual model of the ecosystem resilience of forests. A hierarchical indicator system was designed with the influencing factors of the forest ecosystem resilience, including the stand conditions and the ecological memory, which were further disaggregated into specific indicators. Furthermore, indicator weights were determined with the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the coefficient of variation method. Based on the remote sensing data and forest inventory data and so forth, the resilience index of forests was calculated. The result suggests that there is significant spatial heterogeneity of the ecosystem resilience of forests, indicating it is feasible to generate large-scale ecosystem resilience maps with this assessment model, and the results can provide a scientific basis for the conservation of forests, which is of great significance to the climate change mitigation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 122
Author(s):  
Dyah Nursita Utami

ABSTRACTNatural disasters that occur in Indonesia are disasters caused by climate change, such as landslides, floods, flash floods, droughts, forest and land fires, crop failures and other natural disaster. Climate change such as rainfall trends, temperature trends, normal changes in rainfall, extreme climate changes greatly affect the balance of the environmental ecosystem which then becomes one of the triggers of natural disasters that occur. For example changes in high rainfall will affect the physical, biological and chemical nature of the soil which makes soil prone to soil erosion and even landslides can occur. Extreme changes in air temperature also affect soil degradation resulting in soil compaction, fractures, acidification and reduced soil organic matter and biodiversity of soil biota, so that plants lack nutrients and eventually crop failure occurs.Because of that basis, the study of the impacts of climate change on soil properties needs to be done in the hope that they can take the right steps in dealing with climate change, so that the environment has resilience in dealing with climate change Keywords: climate change, soil degradation, environmental resilience ABSTRAKBencana alam yang terjadi di Indonesia merupakan bencana yang banyak disebabkan oleh adanya perubahan iklim, seperti tanah longsor, banjir, banjir bandang, kekeringan, kebakaran hutan dan lahan, gagal panen serta bencana alam lain sebagainya. Perubahan iklim seperti tren curah hujan, tren suhu, perubahan normal curah hujan, ekstrem perubahan iklim sangat mempengaruhi keseimbangan ekosistem lingkungan yang kemudian menjadi salah satu trigger bencana alam itu terjadi. Sebagai contoh perubahan curah hujan yang tinggi akan mempergaruhi sifat tanah secara fisik, biologi dan kimiawi yang menjadikan tanah rawan terkena erosi tanah bahkan dapat terjadi tanah longsor. Perubahan suhu udara yang ekstrim juga berpengaruh terhadap degradasi tanah sehingga terjadi pemadatan tanah, rekahan, pengasaman serta berkurangnya bahan organik tanah serta biodiversitas biota tanah, sehingga tanaman kekurangan unsur hara dan akhirnya terjadi gagal panen. Karena dasar itulah kajian dampak perubahan iklim terhadap sifat-sifat tanah perlu dilakukan dengan harapan dapat mengambil langkah yang tepat dalam menghadapi perubahan iklim, sehingga lingkungan mempunyai ketangguhan (resilience) dalam menghadapi perubahan iklim. Kata kunci: perubahan iklim, degradasi tanah, ketangguhan lingkungan.


Author(s):  
Samuel K. Nyaga ◽  
Geofrey K. Gathungu ◽  
Justin Nyaga ◽  
Jafford R. Njeru

Africa is under pressure from climate stresses and is highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. In Kenya, agriculture is the backbone of the economy making it an important contributor to food security of rural households. Currently crop productivity is being affected by continued climate variations and decline in soil fertility. Adaptation to climate change requires to be given high and urgent priority for sustainable crop production. A study was conducted in Mavuria ward, Mbeere South Sub-County, Embu County to evaluate the effects of climate change adaptation on crop production. The study used both descriptive and experimental research designs. The primary data on adaptation measures was collected from farmers and institutions using questionnaires. In the data analysis, descriptive statistics were used to organize the climate data and that of the respondents into frequencies. Further, a Pearson correlation test was done to determine the relationship between farmer and institutional based mechanisms on adaptation to climate change at α=0.05. The main adaptation mechanisms identified were soil fertility improvement, soil and water conservation, early planting, pest and disease control, provision of certified seeds, and awareness creation. In view of these findings, the study recommends continuous implementation of these measures that can help strengthen farmers and institutional adaptation mechanisms towards climate change for improved crop production.


Climate ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Feng Pan ◽  
Woonsup Choi

Land use/land cover (LULC) and climate changes could affect water quantity and quality and thus hydrologic ecosystem services (ES). However, studies of these impacts on hydrologic ES are limited by the current methods and techniques. We attempted to find out how the LULC and climate changes impact hydrologic ES at different temporal scales so that decision-makers can easily understand hydrologic ES variations for guiding management plans. In this study, we analyzed the impacts of LULC and climate changes on hydrologic ES in the Milwaukee River basin, USA with a conceptual modeling framework for hydrologic ES. The model framework was applied to a series of climate and urban expansion scenarios. Two hydrologic responses (streamflow and sediment) and three hydrologic ES (water provision index (WPI), flood regulation index (FRI), and sediment regulation index (SRI)) were calculated. Major findings include: (1) Climate change has much larger impacts than LULC at the monthly scale. For example, the impacts of climate change on streamflow were −6 to 9 m3/s whereas those of LULC change were −0.4 to 0.2 m3/s. Also, WPI (ranging from 0 to 1) changed between −0.16 and 0.07 with climate change but between −0.02 and −0.001 with LULC changes. (2) Compared to changes at the annual scale, the results show much larger variabilities as monthly time-series and mean monthly numbers. These findings suggest that the climate change weighs more than the realistic LULC change in term of impacts on hydrologic ES and those impacts can be identified with results at the monthly temporal scale. This approach with the framework and scenarios can better support management planning for decision-makers with detailed results and temporal precision.


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