Climate Change and Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: Constraints and Adaptation Strategies

Abstract

In today’s era, one of the most important threat to existence of human in climate change. Climate change is damaging people’s lives today. The impacts of climate change on health are core consideration of both the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Climate change has created havoc for the sustainable rural livelihoods in developing countries. Rural households are most vulnerable to climate change because of dependency on climate related resources like agriculture, livestock, forests etc. resulting in less diversification of livelihoods which further increase their vulnerability. Although various sustainable livelihood practices are being used by rural households but due to various constraints, they are not fully effective. Adaptation to climate change requires adjustments at all levels. The communities which are suffering from the climate change have to increase their resilience towards climate change by adopting appropriate technologies while make proper use of their traditional knowledge. Indigenous knowledge is increasingly being used as a tool for climate change adaptation. Vulnerable communities have used indigenous practices to plan adaptation and disaster risk reduction activities. Furthermore, government is focussing for sustainable development and climate change adaptation by finding and administering alternative methods to deal with issues of poverty and environmental degradation in context of linkage between livelihood and the immediate environment of the people. Finally, there is great potential for current policies to be implemented strategically towards building true adaptive capacity for the rural communities. At last, adaptation to climate change requires adjustments and implementations at each level- be it community, national or international.