Assessment of adaptive capacity and adaptation to climate change in the farming households of Eastern Himalayan foothills of West Bengal, India

Abstract

The Indian agricultural sector is highly vulnerable to climate change. Hence, the adoption of appropriate adaptation measures by the farmers is crucial for reducing the adverse effects, and it is expected that farmers with higher adaptive capacity would be better equipped to respond to the rapidly changing climatic conditions. Therefore, understanding the factors that are likely to influence farmers’ adaptive capacity is critical for efficiently targeting adaptation and capacity-building initiatives. Based on the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (SLF), this study explored farming households’ adaptive capacity in three climatic hazard-prone villages of the Eastern Himalayan foothills of West Bengal, India. The Analytical Hierarchy Process was used to assign weights to the indicators under the SLF, and the consistency ratio was 0.04, indicating the adequacy of the derived weights for assessing adaptive capacity. The findings showed that only 11.41 percent of households had a high adaptive capacity, whereas 60.40 and 28.19 percent had moderate and low adaptive capacity, respectively. It is found that a large number of households having a low adaptive capacity left their land as fallow. While the majority of households with moderate and high adaptive capacity diversified their farming systems or switched from traditional staple cereals to less water-intensive cash crops. The differences in natural, physical, and financial capital are mainly responsible for the differential adaptive capacity among the farming households in this region. However, there were considerable differences among the villages in terms of asset distribution. Therefore, sustainable adaptive capacity-driven policy initiatives to enable efficient adaptation and agrarian welfare are of paramount importance in this region.