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This book contains eight chapters that bring theories, approach and application from a wide range of disciplines
. Four of the chapters deal with theoretical background of emerging concepts such as environmental economics, ecosystem based adaptation, payment for ecosystem services and environmental management. Similarly, three chapters cover conventional topics of environmental science: geological and hydrological processes, fresh water resources and waste management. A chapter on newly introduced topic of gender and social inclusion elaborates how such cross-cutting issues are important in environmental decision making. Each chapter brings some case studies of learning, that of Nepal, where available. The book chapters are prepared by a team comprising university faculty and subject experts affiliated with environmental science. The chapters are the collection of published materials relevant to the subject, and summarized with suggested references for details or further learning. The revised MSc Environmental Science curriculum contains 20 theory papers (10 compulsory and 10 specialized/electives). Altogether there are 102 units in these theory papers. We confess that the present volume of book only serves a small portion of this total requirement as rendered by the curriculum in its contents and references. The users, both the faculty and graduate students may take it as an indicative resource rather than a complete subject chapter. Their suggestions and feed backs will surely be valuable in bringing publications of similar kind but in better shape in the future
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Agriculture is an important type of land use but suffers from drought, especially under global climate change scenarios
. Although government is a major actor in helping farmers to adapt to drought, lack of funds has constrained its efforts. Public-Private Partnership (PPP) mechanism has been widely applied in urban infrastructure development to raise fund for public goods and services, but very few studies explored its role in rural areas. Based on interview of 139 farming households and open-ended interview of village heads, government officials and company representatives, in the Lujiang Flatland in the Nu River (Upper Salween) Valley, Southwest China, this paper aims to reveal how PPP functions to enhance farmers' adaptation to drought. We found that farmers have developed multiple strategies in their own ways to adapt to drought, including pumping and store water, using water-saving irrigation techniques, changing of crops, and strengthening water management at the community level, while insufficient funds, water resource scarcity and mismatch of time-scale of crop growth and drought even hindered their adaptation options. Limited fund sources, gap in policy implementation and weak performance of government-funded projects hindered governmental supports to be effective. Weak motivation and distrusted by farmers limited the engagement of private enterprises in supporting farmers to adapt to drought. PPP mechanism has the potential to mobilize fund from multiple sources, share costs, risks and benefits among different stakeholders, combine both scientific and local knowledge, and reduce uncertainty through formal and informal institutions. Benefited from these advantages, PPP mechanism could improve project performance, thus increase farmers’ adaptation options and resilience to drought. This study offers referential lessons and valuable insights for agricultural development, especially for mountain communities vulnerable to exceptional and recurrent drought episodes under warming climate
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Vij, S.; Moors, E.; Ahmad, B.; Uzzaman, A.; Bhadwal, S.; Biesbroek, R.; Gioli, G.; Groot, A.; Mallick, D.; Regmi, B.; Saeed, B. A.; Ishaq, S.; Thapa, B.; Werners, S. E.; Wester, P.
This paper analyses and assesses how existing policies and approaches in South Asia consider long-term climate change adaptation
. Presently, it is unclear what approaches are used in the existing policies to cope with the future climatic changes. Our research framework consists of two components. First, we identify and define key characteristics of adaptation policy approaches based on a review of scientific journal articles. The key characteristics identified are institutional flexibility, adaptive nature, scalability and reflexivity. Second, we analyse the presence of these characteristics in the climate change adaptation policies of Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan. Our findings show that the four South Asian countries contribute to only 8% of the total journal articles on adaptation policy, with least papers representing Pakistan and Nepal. Reviewing the adaptation policies, we find that except for the Climate Change Policy of Nepal, none of the policies discusses transboundary scale adaptation approaches. The identified adaptation policies lack focus on shared transboundary resources between the countries, and instead focus at national or sub-national scale. This is reflected by relatively low scores for the scalability characteristic. All the countries show high scores for institutional flexibility, suggesting that changing roles and responsibilities between government agencies for adaptation planning and implementation is accepted in the four countries. We conclude that to prevent a loss of flexibility and to promote scalability of shared transboundary resources, policy approaches such as anticipatory governance, robust decision-making, and adaptation pathways can be useful for long-term climate change adaptation
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The main objective of the workshop was to provide an overview of the HI-AWARE project to the people of the area and to inform them about PARC's plans there
. Another objective was to create awareness in the local community about the impacts of climate change and possible adaptation measures in sectors like agriculture, energy, and water. By using collaborative discussions the workshop also aimed at identifying climate-related stresses faced by them
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In the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH), rural women manage natural resources and deal directly with the impacts and risks associated with climate change
. With more men migrating from rural areas, women’s roles as risk and resource managers need to be supported and strengthened.
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Cochrane, L.; Cundill, G.; Ludi, E.; New, M.; Nicholls, R. J.; Wester, P.; Cantin, B.; Murali, K. S.; Leone, M.; Kituyi, E.; Landry, M.-E.
The reality of global climate change demands novel approaches to science that are reflective of the scales at which changes are likely to occur, and of the new forms of knowledge required to positively influence policy to support vulnerable populations
. We examine some of the opportunities and challenges presented by a collaborative, transdisciplinary research project on climate change adaptation in Africa and Asia that utilized a hotspot approach. A large-scale effort to develop appropriate baselines was a key challenge at the outset of the program, as was the need to develop innovative methodologies to enable researchers to work at appropriate spatial scales. Efforts to match research to the biophysical scales at which change occurs need to be aware of the mismatch that can develop between these regional scales and the governance scales at which decisions are made
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This paper examines the role of financial remittances on the adaptive capacity of households in flood-affected rural communities of Upper Assam in India
. Findings reveal that remittances-receiving households are likely to have better access to formal financial institutions, insurance and communication devices than nonrecipient households. This study indicates that the duration for which remittances are received by a household has a significant and positive association with structural changes made by the household to address flood impacts, farm mechanization, the household’s access to borrowing, and participation in collective action on flood relief, recovery and preparedness. The adaptation potential of remittances of remittances can be realized if policy attention is given to attempts to enable gains in financial capital to be translated to gains in other types of capital and how the social element of remittances can be used to boost social capital. For example, by facilitating an increase in financial literacy and skills training, particularly among the poorer households in areas likely to be affected by the impacts of climate change and variability
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Research on adaptation barriers is increasing as the need for climate change adaptation becomes evident
. However, empirical studies regarding the emergence, causes and sustenance of adaptation barriers remain limited. This research identifies key contextual causes of adaptation barriers in water institutions in the mountainous Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh in northern India. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with representatives from twenty-six key governmental, non-governmental, academic and research institutions in the State with responsibilities spanning domestic water supply, irrigation and hydropower generation, environmental monitoring and research. It identified low knowledge capacity and resources, policy implementation gaps, normative attitudes, and unavailability and inaccessibility of data and information compounded with weak interinstitutional networks as key adaptation barriers. Although these barriers are similar to those reported elsewhere, they have important locally-contextual root causes. For instance, inadequate resources result from fragmented resources allocation due to competing developmental priorities and the desire of the political leadership to please diverse electors, rather than climate scepticism. The identified individual barriers are found to be highly inter-dependent and closely intertwined which enables the identification of leverage points for interventions to maximise barrier removal. For instance, breaking down key barriers hindering accessibility to data and information, which are shaped by systemic bureaucracies and cultural attitudes, will involve attitudinal change through sensitisation to the importance of accurate and accessible data and information and the building trust between different actors, in addition to institutional structural changes through legislation and inter-institutional agreements. Approaching barriers as a system of contextually interconnected cultural, systemic, geographical and political underlying factors enriches the understanding of adaptation enablers, thereby contributing to achieving a better adapted society
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There is a growing consensus among migration scholars that remittances tend to be a counter-cyclical shock absorber in times of crisis
. In mountain contexts of the global South, lack of formal employment opportunities, precarious land rights, subsistence agriculture, along with the lack of access to financial instruments and social protection, severely limit the ability of people to cope with crisis and insure themselves against risks. The extent to which remittances can contribute to climate change adaptation requires further exploration. Previous research has adopted an index-based approach to examine the vulnerability of a country, community, sector, or ecosystem. However, similar methodology has not been applied to explore whether remittances have a role in reducing the vulnerability of recipient households to a particular environmental stressor. Floods are a major environmental stressor in the Upper Indus Sub-basin. However, village level flood preparedness remains low, and household level flood preparedness is comprised of short-term strategies. Remittances are crucial to meet the basic needs (e.g. food, education, healthcare) of recipient households. The findings from the vulnerability assessment indicate that remittance recipient households are marginally less vulnerable than non-recipient households. Remittance recipient households have lower dependence on the environment, better access to formal financial institutions, and are less likely to reduce food consumption during floods. In contrast, among the households engaged in farming, more non-recipient households have made changes in agricultural practices in response to floods than remittance recipient households
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This study is an attempt to use group information collected on climate change from farmers in eastern Uttar Pradesh, India to address a key question related to climate change policy: How to encourage farmers to adapt to climate change? First, we investigate farmers’ perception of and adaptation to climate change using content analysis and group information
. The findings are then compared with climatic and agriculture information collected through secondary sources. Results suggest that though farmers are aware of long-term changes in climatic factors (temperature and rainfall, for example), they are unable to identify these changes as climate change. Farmers are also aware of risks generated by climate variability and extreme climatic events. However, farmers are not taking concrete steps in dealing with perceived climatic changes, although we find out that farmers are changing their agricultural and farming practices. These included changing sowing and harvesting timing, cultivation of crops of short duration varieties, inter-cropping, changing cropping pattern, investment in irrigation, and agroforestry. Note that these changes may be considered as passive response or adaptation strategies to climate change. Perhaps farmers are implicitly taking initiatives to adapt climate change. Finally, the paper suggests some policy interventions to scale up adaptation to climate change in Indian agriculture
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