West Bengal Farmer Consultation

One of the two projects on which I'm working with TERI deals with how climate change affects water resource availability in north-central India. The project has multiple components being handled by several partner institutions in India and Europe and includes climate and water modeling, socioeconomic scenario development, field visits and stakeholder consultations. In brief, the idea is to 1) downscale global climate model projections to a more useful regional level, 2) use these regional predictions to model the likely impacts on water resource availability (both in terms of glacial melt and monsoon precipitation patterns, 3) think about how things like population growth, income change, and urbanization over the next 50 years will interact with changing water resource availability, and 4) to go talk to people in a couple of case study sites to better understand the local situation and what climate change may look like in that particular place. Finally, 5) wrap it all up with a bunch of reports/workshops/information-sharing.  

All the case study sites for this project are in the Ganges river basin. The Ganges river has a significance in India that is difficult for westerners to understand. It is a holy river in Hinduism, worshiped as the goddess Ganga. Over 400 million people live in the river's catchment area, making it the most heavily populated watershed in the world.  Stretching from the Himalaya in northern India through the Gangetic plain to the Bay of Bengal, the Ganges is a critical artery through the subcontinent with massive cultural, biological, and agricultural importance.  

         From http://dilipkumar.in/india/rivers/ganga_purity.php  

The four case study sites were selected to represent a variety of agricultural landscapes within the basin. The district of Udham Singh Nagar in Uttarakhand state is in the upper basin. From the middle basin are the sites of Delhi and Allahabad, in Uttar Pradesh state.  And in the lower basin is the town of Kharagpur, near Kolkata in West Bengal state.

In March I attended a community consultation in a village near the Kharagpur case study site. Rousting ourselves early from our guest house at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, we drove for 3 hours to a village in Midnapore West district.  Our first meeting with about 10 district-level officials and agricultural scientists was held in the local Krishi Vigyan Kendra (KVK), an agricultural extension office run by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research.  The researchers from IIT Kharagpur and TERI explained how we were there to learn from the local experts and to connect on-the-ground fact-finding and human stories with the output of the impersonal computer models. For the next hour, the researchers lead the workshop participants through a discussion of what environmental problems were impacting agriculture in the area and what some possible solutions might be.  

Overall, the participants were fairly pessimistic. The discussion focused on the increasing cost of cultivation due to both labor shortages and small land holdings.  Poor farm laborers are migrating to the city in search of better jobs, leaving insufficient manpower to cultivate even the small plots of land held by most families. Efficiencies of scale through mechanization are impossible due to the high cost of equipment and the small farm size. The area is highly water-stressed - the water table has been over-exploited and the local characteristics of the soil make recharge a very slow process.  Rainwater harvesting has been going on in the area since 2005, but the structures are very expensive to build. Increasing temperature and decreasing humidity have negativity affected the cultivation of fodder grasses for livestock, impacting the health of cattle.

The participants were also very pessimistic about the ability of the government to help them.  They also questioned the value of our visit. Over the years, many NGOs and researchers have come to ask about their problems. But then off they go to publish their papers, never to return with assistance or information.  I felt very self-conscious during this discussion - a large white lady expressing intellectual curiosity but with very little understanding of the problems these people face every day. Although none of these problems can be firmly attributed to climate change, these issues are vulnerabilities that decrease the resiliency of the area to the eventual inevitable climate change impacts.  

The Krishi Vigyan Kendra office 

IIT Kharagpur researchers consulting with the district-level officials 

The district level meeting concluded with lunch - dal, rice, and vegetable stew delivered from the kitchen in massive buckets. We all sat at long tables, shoveling up the sticky mixture with our fingers and depositing it in our mouths with the minimum of mess.  Eating rice and gravy with your fingers is very much an acquired skill, and more of my rice may have ended up on my face and the table than in my mouth.  I asked one of the Indian researchers why people ate with their fingers when spoons, which are not exactly advanced technology, are not hard to come by.  "When you eat with your hands, you enjoy your food more" was the answer.  "The feel of the rice in your fingers enhances the experience, and allows you to eat with an additional sense, the sense of touch".  

After lunch, it was time to consult with the farmers themselves.  The KVK officials had recruited about 20 farmers to come and share their experiences with us.  Their comments were much the same as the district level officials.  They told of increased problems with elephants raiding their crops and of high-energy rain events that it was impossible to store and that just ran off straight into the ocean.  Rice seeds had failed to germinate in recent years due to high temperatures.  Overuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides had killed all the earthworms, causing a decline in vermiculture.

The farmers were much more enthusiastic about the session than the district level officials had been.  They seemed ecstatic to have such a strange group of people interested in hearing about their problems.  We tried to communicate clearly that we didn't have anything to give them, that we were just here to learn.  They accepted this, and were still excited to share their story.

Last activity of the day: to visit the village.  One farmer guided our research group through a sal forest plantation to his family's fields.  And there it was, iron-age agriculture.  Buffalo-driven plows and hand-picked potatoes.  And in the village, mud huts with equal proportions of wide-eyed children and goats peering out of them.  More than half of India's 1.2 billion people live in rural villages such as this. This is the real India, and seeing it first hand, far removed from the tourist sites most visitors to India experience, was uniquely special.

Disclaimer: Before I inadvertently give the impression that my Hindi is amazing, I should reveal that due to the mixed language abilities of our group, simultaneous translation of most comments occured in Hindi, Bangla, English and Dutch.  Fortunately for me, I can speak at least one of these languages fluently.

Back to Basics: Project Description and Ecosystem-based Adaptation

OK, time to get serious and talk about some research. My next couple of posts will describe some research-related site visits I've done in the last few months.  To get everyone on the same page, I thought I would start with some background on what exactly it is that I'm doing here in India. For those of you who are just here for the pictures, I won't be offended if you skip ahead to the next post.

My original Fulbright proposal was to research adaptation to climate change in the particular context of India. I'm interested in both the high-level policy perspective (as in what institutional players are involved, where the money is coming from, etc), as well as the grass-roots perspective (what does an on-the-ground adaptation project look like?). For those of you new to this field (as I was before coming here), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines adaptation as the “adjustment in natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects, which moderates harm or exploits beneficial opportunities”.  Adaptation has frequently been overshadowed by greenhouse gas mitigation in international climate change agreements.  While mitigation strives to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases, the cause of climate change, adaptation acknowledges the critical importance of preparing and planning for the inevitable impacts of climate change even while trying to stop it.  Even if all greenhouse gas emissions were to stop tomorrow, the carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and fluorinated gases already in the atmosphere from human activity would continue to cause climate impacts for centuries to come. 

Adaptation is an issue of immediate relevance for both developing and developed countries, as sea level rise, changing temperature and precipitation patterns, and associated impacts on habitat and biodiversity will affect every nation on the planet.  However, because the best adaptation to climate change is to be rich, poorer segments of the population in developing countries will suffer the worst impacts.  It is a particularly cruel irony that these poor and natural resource-dependent people who had no role in creating the problem will suffer the worst impacts. The few existing international funding sources available for adaptation assistance recognize only the poorest nations. India does not fall into this category and thus, climate change adaptation projects undertaken in India must primarily be organized and funded internally. 

Adaptation to climate change can take many forms and can occur at the individual, community, or government level.  Everything from buying an air-conditioning unit to planting drought-resistant crops to designing infrastructure projects to withstand extreme weather can constitute adaptation.  My project focuses on a specific subset of adaptation known as ecosystem-based adaptation. This type of adaptation acknowledges the connection between ecosystem health and human health and well-being.  Ecosystem-based adaption helps human communities adapt to climate change by generating economic opportunity, building resilience in natural systems, and mitigating the harmful impacts of climate change. Rural, resource-dependent communities most at risk from climate change will be the primary beneficiaries of ecosystem adaptation projects.    

Since coming to Delhi in November 2010, I've been working with the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) on two of their ecosystem-based adaptation projects. I've also been pursuing a few independent projects of my own. My next few posts will describe some of these projects and case studies in different parts of the country. 

Fulbright to India

In late April 2010 I received word that my application for a Fulbright research grant to India for the 2010-2011 grant cycle had been accepted. I submitted the application way back in October 2009, and had almost (but not quite) succeeded in forgetting about it, so being awarded the grant was extremely exciting! In August 2010 I will travel to India to spend the next 12 months learning about the national context for climate change adaptation, specifically focusing on ecosystem-based adaptation, it's connection to human health and well-being, and stakeholder processes for investigating locally appropriate adaptation measures. I hope to also conduct a number of case studies to identify climate change vulnerabilities and possible adaptation measures in a variety of landscapes and livelihood types.

I've never kept a blog before, but wanted to share my experiences with friends, family, and collaborators. Please comment and keep in touch, and let me know if I'm doing this wrong...