Adapting to climate change: an assessment of local adaptation planning processes in forest-based communities in Nepal (original) (raw)
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In Nepal, community forest user groups (CFUGs) as local institutions have demonstrated appropriate institutional arrangements to manage forest resources as commons. The characteristics, functions and roles of CFUGs required to manage commons are well studied and have been translated into practice. Less is known about the role of CFUGs, as local institutions, in managing local adaptation to climate change and climate variability, particularly the key characteristics and functions required to support vulnerable communities. Case study research on the issues of development of adaptation strategies by CFUGs and villagers of differing well-being groups in the mountains of Nepal is reported through qualitative and quantitative research methods. This research examines the role and potential of CFUGs as key local institution to enable vulnerable communities, individually or as a collective to promote actions for climate change adaptation in the rural hills of Nepal. Of interest are the mand...
Effectiveness of the Local Adaptation Plan of Action to support climate change adaptation in Nepal
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The community-based climate change adaptation plan of action (CAPA) ensures a bottom-up planning process to minimize climate impacts on the livelihood of vulnerable people and provides adaptation actions for increasing resilience capacity in Nepal. This paper mainly examines the role of participatory tools and techniques with the potential to identify the level of vulnerability and likely adaptation measures to increase the forest resilience capacities of communities where CAPA has been prepared (i.e. CAPA group). In total, 13 participatory qualitative tools were evaluated against 15 criteria for identifying their performance in nine CAPA groups representing three geographical regions of Nepal. Multivariate analyses of the participatory tools and their performance allowed for selecting the most similar and dissimilar CAPA groups. The results indicated how CAPA groups are evaluating the likelihood of climate change impact, determining the vulnerability of specific ecosystem services and understanding the possible local adaptation measures. Many methods do not offer conditions for exploiting new innovative opportunities, assessing scenarios or identifying ecosystem services in the CAPA process. Tools are required that consider qualitative and quantitative evaluation methods, measure vulnerability and ecosystem functions and services. Although many issues related to local conditions and vulnerabilities have not been tapped adequately, it is difficult to generalize individual case study results within the different geographical contexts of Nepal. The integration of adaptation planning in local institutions, in order to deal with different ecosystem-based adaptation options, along with identification of climate change scenarios, impacts, trade-offs, synergies and the sensitivity of management problems, is highly recommended.
Ecology and Society, 2022
Impacts of climate change, manifested in different forms, are integrally linked with context-specific socioeconomic , political, and environmental stressors. Dealing with climatic risks, in most parts, requires understanding these mundane location-specific stressors exacerbated by climate variability and change. In large part, the discussion about dealing with impending threats from climate change has relied on policy objectives hatched at the global and national levels. Despite the fact that these policy objectives are responsible for a wide range of actions at the local levels, they often struggle to incorporate the voices of local communities. With the goal of integrating bottom-up and top-down approaches in climate adaptation and connecting them to local development, the Local Adaptation Plans of Action (LAPA) initiative in Nepal makes a promising case. However, little is known about the institutional barriers and enablers of local adaptation initiatives and how they are affected by the political nature of climate adaptation. Using Nepal's LAPA as a case study and relying on a preliminary field visit, analysis of LAPA documents, and interviews with stakeholders, we reveal several obstacles local communities face that limit their ability to adapt. These obstacles include regular challenges such as insufficient financial resources and the lack of implementation support, to more specific ones such as less recognition of local knowledge and power differences among institutions and between local-level stakeholders having varying interests, power, and views. Our results show gender-based differences on a few key issues. By building on the local knowledge, enhancing local capacity, and by fostering interaction among different actors having unequal power relationships, local efforts such as LAPA can increase the ownership of adaptation policy objectives both at global and local levels. Most importantly, this paper reveals the struggle in linking identified options for dealing with climate change with everyday practices of managing risk and uncertainty.
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Community management of forests are considered to be vital for responding to Climate Change (CC) impacts. However, the questions of how do local communities perceive climate changes and how or whether their activities contributing to addressing climate change impacts are still widely debated. This paper aims to examine Nepal’s community forestry stakeholders’ experience of Climate Change (CC) impacts. A semi structured questionnaire survey of 310 local households was carried out on 31 Community Forestry User Groups (CFUGs) in Siraha, Saptari and Udaypur in inner Terai and Terai regions, Nepal. We stratified households into rich, medium, poor, and poorest based on their socioeconomic status. The analysis results showed that 59% of local respondents had seen an increase in temperature, heat waves (82.9%) and cold waves (51.6%). Conversely, rainfall intensity (65.8%), fog intensity (47.42%), fuzzy sky (50%) and humidity (36%) had decreased. Socioeconomic conditions, forest and climatic...