There is dearth of literature related to the livelihood impacts of climate change in the context of developing countries. Few notable studies conducted on the Nepalese context are mostly qualitative descriptions, usually based on general reconnaissance of an area or based on group discussions. This book builds on these literatures by conducting a holistic analysis of the livelihood implications of climate change utilizing information obtained by anthropological approaches as well as structured household surveys; and undertakes a combined approach of qualitative and quantitative approaches in data analysis. Uniquely, this book analyses the trends of recorded temperature and rainfall for both long-term as well short-term to empirically show that community perceptions tally more with the short-term trends rather than the long-term trends. The previous studies analyze the determinants of perceptions without differentiating the perceptions of rainfall and temperature and giving no considerations to the directions of perception to match the recorded trends. This book addresses these issues while analyzing the determinants of perceptions.
This book contributes to the existing literature by making a quantitative comparison of the adaptive capacity with the adoption of adaptation practices to highlight the components of adaptive capacity that play a major role to enable the households to translate their capacity into actual practices. This book takes a step forward to integrate the community perceptions in the adaptation framework, considering the ability to perceive the ongoing changes in line with the recorded data, and differentiating the perceptions of temperature changes from the perceptions of rainfall changes. The analysis shows that the implications of perceptions of rainfall changes on adaptation choices are quite different from the implications of perceptions of temperature changes.