Perceived Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Strategy of Indigenous Community (Chepangs) in Rural Mid-hills of Nepal

Abstract

Climate change is projected to increase in vulnerable areas of the world, and marginalized communities residing in rural areas are more vulnerable to the change. The perceptions of climate change and adaptation strategies made by such communities are important considerations in the design of adaptation strategies by policy-makers. We examined the most marginalized indigenous group "Chepang" communities' perceptions towards this change, variability, and their attitudes to adaptations and adapted coping measures in mid-hills of Nepal. We interviewed 155 individuals from two Chepang communities, namely, Shaktikhor and Siddhi in Chitwan district of Nepal. We also analyzed biophysical data to assess the variability. The findings showed that the Chepang community has experienced significant impacts of climate change and variability. They attributed crop disease, insect infestation, human health problem, and weather-related disaster as the impacts of climate change. Strategies they have adopted in response to the change are the use of intense fertilizers in farmland, hybrid seeds cultivation, crop diversification, etc. Local level and national level adaptation policies need to be designed and implemented as soon as possible to help climate vulnerable communities like Chepangs to cope against the impacts of climate change.

Climate change, climatic disasters, and adaptation techniques: learnings from the lowlands of Nepal

“…However, in our case, local communities are using irrigation canals to irrigate their agricultural lands. To address the issue of declining agricultural production, local communities have introduced hybrids (e.g., Gorakhnath, US-312) and improved varieties (e.g., Shanti, Ramdhan, Sarju) of rice crops, which is in line with the finding that the hybrid seeds are replacing the local varieties (Khanal & Kattel, 2017;Khanal et al, 2019). Forests and trees, when sustainably managed, can play an important role in climate change mitigation and adaptation as they help in reducing drought, increasing rainfall, and maintaining rainfall time (FAO, 2007).…”

“…Chhetri (2012) found that the number of crops per year has been reduced from three to two crops per year. Due to climate change, water resources have been decreased (Ghimire et al, 2019). Diseases like Malaria and allergies, and itching are increasing with the changing climate (Blayneh et al, 2009) and are affecting human health.…”

“…Despite their negligible contribution to global warming, least developed countries like Nepal are amongst the countries most susceptible to the impacts of climate change due to their limited capacity to deal with them (Manandhar et al, 2011). Nepal is recognized as the fourth most climate-vulnerable nation globally and has good reasons to be concerned about climate change (Adhikari et al, 2018;Khanal et al, 2019). Climate change has added additional stress on poor communities in Nepal (Pant, 2012), where the poorest communities are struggling to fulfill their basic needs .…”

Assessing Socio-Economic Factors Affecting the Implementation of Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) Mechanism

“…Other possible reasons for adopting pre-existing local institutions are that they function based on local knowledge systems and economic development builds off of the pre-existing institutions that communities have rather than trying to reinvent them. Moreover, there exists a strong relationship between respondents and local institutions enhanced with traditional, cultural, social, and political bonding [31,32].…”

People’s Perception on Climate Change: The Context of Local and Global Discourse

“…According to the result conducted by Tiwari et al (2010), More than 80 per cent of households responded that they had noticed an increase in temperature over the previous five years, as well as low snowfall in the High Mountains and rainfall in the Mid Mountains and Terai region. Khanal et al (2019) found that significant impacts of climate change and variability have been felt by the Chepang community. They identified weather-related disasters, crop diseases, insect infestations, and human health problems as effects of climate change.…”