An Overview of Climate Change And Its Impact on Agriculture: a Review From Least Developing Country, Nepal

Abstract

Climate is an important factor for agricultural production. However, in recent years consistent warming and rise in global temperature has resulted in visible impacts on the agriculture across the world. Nepal is not an exceptional case, where rising temperature has already affected the country's agricultural production thereby affecting the food security and agrarian communities. It is expected that the level of vulnerability will be higher in high altitude as compared to the lower altitude. In addition, majority of the population are subsistence farmer in rural parts of Nepal and has low land holding capacity. Nepal is one of the least developed countries in the world with low per capita income, and thus the country's ability to adapt to the extreme climatic events has direct implications in its strategies on agriculture sector development. However, Nepal still lack strong scientific data about the cases of climate change and due to varied geographical setting, sufficient meteorological data cannot be easily obtained from remote parts of the country. This review tries to explore the current status of vulnerability to the climate change in Nepal. In Nepal, more than 80% of the people heavily rely on agriculture for their subsistence and thus, climate change will bring expectedly negative response to the agricultural sector in the country.

Agriculture and Food Security under Climate Change in Nepal

“…Nepal still lacks strong scientific data climate change, and due to varied geographical setting sufficient meteorological data cannot be easily obtained from remote parts of the country [24]. This has so far reduced to a few the studies tackling such issue, and more investigation is required.…”

“…Among others, Karki and Gurung [24] discuss impact of climate change on Nepali agriculture. Also based on [42,29], they suggest that impact of climate change is expected to be severe in the mountain and Himalayas, as compared to plain areas.…”

“…With an estimated GDP of $562 per capita in 2012, Nepal is ranked amongst the poorest countries worldwide, and displays 25% of population below poverty line of $ 1.25 per day [24]. In spite of the large supply of freshwater from the Himalayas [25,26], 28% of the population is thought not to have access to safe drinking water.…”

“…Due to lack of investment capacity and infrastructure as well as lack of market opportunities, the majority of poor peasants adopt traditional technology in their production system [29], and it is estimated that hardly 13% of the agricultural products are traded in the market [30]. Approximately 17% of the total land area of Nepal is agricultural [24], but only 27% of such agricultural land has access to irrigation, and it is located above all in the Terai zone (the southern, more fertile belt along the NepalIndia border), whereas the great part of arable land is rain-fed. Rice single cropping is feasible up to 2200 m a.s.l.…”

“…[4,31]. Nepal's varied topography and social vulnerability make the country particularly susceptible to climate variations [24,[32][33][34][35][36][37][38], and the country has low adaptive capacity to respond to crop variability under climate change [39]. The effect of recent climate change in Nepal includes rapid temperature increase [3,34,40], erratic rainfall pattern, decreased length of winter, and increased frequency and length of droughts [41].…”