Challenges and prospects of Local Adaptation Plans of Action (LAPA) initiative in Nepal as everyday adaptation

Abstract

Impacts of climate change, manifested in different forms, are integrally linked with context-specific socio-economic, political, and environmental stressors. Dealing with climatic risks, in most parts, requires understanding these mundane location-specific stressors exacerbated by climate variability and change. In large part, the discussion about dealing with impending threats from climate change has relied on policy objectives hatched at the global and national levels. Despite the fact that these policy objectives are responsible for a wide range of actions at the local levels, they often struggle to incorporate the voices of local communities. With the goal of integrating bottom-up and top-down approaches in climate adaptation and connecting them to local development, the Local Adaptation Plans of Action (LAPA) initiative in Nepal makes a promising case. However, little is known about the institutional barriers and enablers of local adaptation initiatives and how they are affected by the political nature of climate adaptation. Using Nepal's LAPA as a case study and relying on a preliminary field visit, analysis of LAPA documents, and interviews with stakeholders, we reveal several obstacles local communities face that limit their ability to adapt. These obstacles include regular challenges such as insufficient financial resources and the lack of implementation support, to more specific ones such as less recognition of local knowledge and power differences among institutions and between local-level stakeholders having varying interests, power, and views. Our results show gender-based differences on a few key issues. By building on the local knowledge, enhancing local capacity, and by fostering interaction among different actors having unequal power relationships, local efforts such as LAPA can increase the ownership of adaptation policy objectives both at global and local levels. Most importantly, this paper reveals the struggle in linking identified options for dealing with climate change with everyday practices of managing risk and uncertainty.

Integration of urban ecosystem-based adaptation in Nepal: A policy landscape analysis

“…Likewise, LAPA [ 51 ] aims to incorporate climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction and management into local development priorities and natural resource management to improve ecosystem resilience, including in the urban domain. Efforts have also been invested in fostering a holistic approach to adaptation planning with the local institutions that are working to integrate LAPA with the Local Disaster Risk Management Planning, a local plan formulated with the support of the Ministry of Home Affairs [ 100 ]. This development is a stepping stone towards inter-ministerial coordination since Ministry of Forest and Environment primarily coordinates climate policy objectives at the federal, provincial, and local levels.…”

Climate change policy instruments in agriculture sector: From policy to adaptation practice at local level in Nepal

“…Thematically, highest share of spending is on agriculture sector (39% of total share). The policy to adaptation practice gap is largely attributable to inadequate investment planning besides under financed and under prepared from global to local level (Acharya, 2022;Ghimire & Chhetri, 2022;JVS/GWP, 2016;Tiwari et al, 2014;UNEP, 2023). Some studies have highlighted inabilities of authorities from to utilize the available resources wisely and sustainably (Maharjan, 2019;.…”

“…Farmers are facing various challenges due to differential effect of climate change and variability at local level in different ecological regions. Similarly, cumulative effect of topographic and climate change /variability has increased vulnerability of farmers with low adaptive capacity (Ghimire & Chhetri, 2022). CC impact on agriculture in Nepal is well documented (Bhandari, 2023;MoFE, 2019b;Panthi, et al, 2015) and major impact are, reduced productivity, increased agriculture input cost, decreased soil fertility, reduced water supply and storage, increasing drought, and damage in crop yield (GoN, 2021a;World Bank, CCAFS & LI-BIRD, 2017).…”

“…Source: Baniya, 2023;Karki, 2023;Acharya, 2022;Ghimire & Chhetri, 2022;Bishwokarma, et al, 2021;Joshi & Joshi, 2021;Khanal et al, 2020;Maharjan, 2019;Nepal, 2019; Singh et al, 2019 S. Shrestha, P. S. Chapagain, M. Dhakal, S. C. Rai, Md. N. Islam,Y.…”

Development geography II: Community-based adaptation and locally-led adaptation

“…In Nepal, for example, as well as national level adaptation planning, Local Adaptation Plans of Action provided some opportunities to link across scales through top-down and bottom-up approaches that were otherwise sometimes challenging (e.g. Ghimire and Chetri, 2022). As the body of evidence for community-based adaptation increased, it was also possible to begin teasing out the nature of enablers of and barriers to success.…”