Climate science

The lands, territories and resources of indigenous peoples (IPs) have been of significant historical importance to their livelihoods, cultures and spiritual identities. Over 370 million indigenous peoples are currently living in 70 countries in the world, mostly in remote, ecologically fragile and marginalized areas that are rich in traditional skills, knowledge and practices. Climate change is a global issue, impacting all livelihood sectors at the national and local levels.

Recent research and IPCC reports extensively document the varied effects of climate change on basins worldwide. This study evaluates the impact of climate change and land use change on the Seti-Gandaki watershed's hydrological regime of Nepal. Using a calibrated hydrological SWAT model, forced with climate scenarios (SSP245 and SSP585), the study projects increased precipitation (2-129% and 3-139%) and a warming trend in temperature.

Indigenous knowledge can function as a basis of innovation in agriculture because it is not only culturally accepted, but often also environmentally adaptive. The debates and misunderstandings regarding the relations between Indigenous and scientific knowledge are transforming into a trend to integrate all knowledge to deal with complex issues, such as climate change.

This study explored people’s perceptions of climate change by conducting interviews and focus-group discussions with local residents of three ecological regions of Nepal, i.e., mountain, midhills, and lowland. Climatic measurements from meteorological stations of the regions were acquired for the period from 1988 to 2018. We compared the people’s perception with trends and variabilities of observed temperature and rainfall patterns.

Climate has significantly changed during last few decades. The mountain environmental change is the visible indicator of climate change. Being, Nepal is a mountainous country, the temperature and precipitation change during last three decades were studied using in-situ meteorological data sets. The Mann-Kendall Test and Sen's slope method were used to find out the changing trend of climate in time series temperature and precipitation data sets in response to different ecological zones.

To access the trends and farmers perception on temperature and precipitation in Chepang community, a research was conducted in Chitwan district of Nepal in the year 2016. Two VDCs, Shaktikhor and Siddhi were selected purposively and sixty households from each village were selected randomly for the study. Primary information was collected from household using semistructured interview schedule and secondary data were collected from Department of Hydrology and Meteorology (DHM), Kathmandu. Microsoft Excel and SPSS were used for descriptive and trend analysis.