Analysis of farmer resilience towards climate variability and extremes in the most vulnerable areas in lower vellar river sub basin india

Abstract

Globally climate change has caused changes in frequency and intensity of climate extremes such as heat waves, droughts, floods and tropical cyclones. There arises a need to understand the pattern of regional climate extremes to develop crucial adaptation strategies for the farming community. The observed trends of precipitation and temperature extremes in Lower Vellar River sub-basin have been analysed using the Expert Team on Climate Risk and Sector-specific Indices for rainfall, relevant for the agriculture and food security sector. The projected trends of precipitation indices have also been analysed to anticipate the future impacts of climate extremes on agriculture. RHtest and RHtests_dlyprcp have been used for climate data quality control and homogeneity assessment of temperature and precipitation data respectively. ClimPact has been used for indices development, and XLSTAT (MS-Excel add-in) has been used for trend analysis. The blocks most vulnerable to climate extremes in the past, present and future have been identified based on the observed and projected trends of climate extremes indices, and other demographic, social and agricultural factors obtained through Rapid Rural Appraisal.Vulnerability Index has been developed using sensitivity, exposure and adaptive capacity indicators with respect to extreme precipitation events namely Cyclone Thane (2011) and Deep Depression of Bay of Bengal (2015), with respect to extreme temperature indices (1969-2005) and for projected rainfall data for the mid-century (2025-2055) for seven blocks falling within Lower Vellar River sub-basin. In this study 36 indicators for Vulnerability Index construction were included. Indices were modified and adopted from literatures and also a few indicators were developed by the author for the study area. Principal Component Analysis has been used for fixing weights for each indicator for development of the Vulnerability Index. newline