Evaluating participatory techniques for adaptation to climate change: Nepal case study

Abstract

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 geo-graphical 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.