Forestry Community’s Strategies For Climate Change Adaptation

Climate change in the rural agricultural village has been seen as natural extreme events, which are non-reasonable, uncontrollable, and unpredictable. This perception, including inadequate knowledge and low priority setting, has resulted to passive mobilization on the mitigation and adaptation to the climate change. Therefore, the objective of the study is to understand the mechanism and strategy developed by local people in order to respond to the climate change and socio-economic changing situation, considering external threats along the time. The study contributes to both climate policies in fulfillment of local baseline information on adaptation, and local development in the sense of incorporating climate change into the plan. Case study approach has been used to represents the local landscape and context, and to generalize the adaptation strategies for the similar locality.Interrelation between natural system and human system in the vulnerability from climate change and variability has been studied using forestry ecosystem and forestry community as respective representatives. The forestry community of Baan Lam Nam Kaew in the past decades experienced extreme events and climate variability. Meteorological information has been analyzed in respect of climate variability, namely rising temperature, droughts, intensive rain, longer delayed rain, and changes the rain pattern. Field crop products as the major incomes to the households and village respectively are uncertain, and consequent to the fluctuation of household incomes. This is because the village exposes and is sensitive to the climate variability. External threat like market pricing is another factor adding vulnerability to the village farmers. However, the field study has found that the farmers have creatively been adapting to the changes of weather and risks of climate along the time. The household strategies to manage ground water recharge and reservation, field diversification and management, and second jobs or out-migration are observed. In community level, as unit of analysis, the study has explored and empirically analyzed three community strategies, namely forestry ecosystem improvement, livelihood diversification from agriculture to tourism and service providing factor, and the adaptive strategic practice of institutional arrangement to manage local development projects, including climate change and environmental conservation activities. Each community strategy has contributed to the adaptation to climate change impacts at the present time.Keeping in mind the dynamic of climate change throughout climate history, the research has further explored the capability and viability of these strategies in the longer term with future climate projections. The results have revealed the fitness of each strategy, if mainstream into the village development plan. Buddhist cultural value as one of the local specific background has inclusively been studied on its contribution to climate change adaptation and through villager’s perspectives on environmental conservation.