Title: Adapting to climate variability: the views of peasant farmers in Nepal

Authors: Sudarshan Chalise; Tek Narayan Maraseni; Jerry Maroulis

Addresses: Griffith Business School, Griffith University, 170 Kessels Road, Nathan QLD 4111, Australia ' Australian Centre for Sustainable Catchments, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Queensland, 4350, Australia ' Soil Physics and Land Management (SLM) Group, Wageningen University, Droevendaalsesteeg 4, 6708 PB Wageningen, The Netherlands

Abstract: There are growing concerns, especially from farmers in rural mid-east Nepal, about main-streaming locally-led climate adaptation strategies. Using a bottom-up approach, we analysed the bio-physical and socio-economic impacts on Nepalese agriculture from three focus group discussions and a survey of 60 peasant farmers to identify the relevant climate change impacts which were used to investigate how farmers' practices overcome any climate-based barriers. The results suggest that farmers are partially able to minimise the impacts of climate-based barriers whereas they have difficulty in coping with non-climatic barriers. The results emphasise the role of government and other stakeholders in locally-led adaptation (not only in mitigation) as an avenue to combat the negative impacts of climate-based variability.

Keywords: climate variability; farmer perceptions; locally-led adaptation; climate change adaptation; peasant farmers; Nepal; rural areas; agriculture; climate change impacts.

DOI: 10.1504/IJGW.2015.069369

International Journal of Global Warming, 2015 Vol.7 No.3, pp.380 - 394

Received: 15 May 2013
Accepted: 10 Nov 2013
Published online: 14 May 2015 *

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