Community perceptions of climate change in Manipur, India

Abstract

Climate change poses a significant threat to the lives and livelihoods of local communities in the Himalayan regions. These regions do not have an extensive network of meteorological stations due to poor infrastructure for climate change studies. Understanding how the local community perceives climate change provides an important insight into specific features of climate change in the data-scarce regions. This study aimed to understand how local communities of Manipur in northeast India have perceived climate change, including its causes and impacts, its influences on their life and their responses. In this study, a survey was conducted in the valley and hill regions of Manipur on local community perceptions of climate change. The survey sample comprised of 193 randomly selected local inhabitants in both the regions. Through this survey, we aimed to determine how local communities respond to the effects of climate change in the study area based on their personal experiences. The results indicated that the local community has fairly strong perceptions of climate change with more than 80% of respondents reporting a change in the cultivation patterns and agricultural productivity have been changing over the years. Another 98% of the respondents acknowledged a change in “summer temperature” over the past 15–20 years as a result of climate change. Further, the majority of respondents (> 97%) are concerned that climate change may increase the frequency of natural disasters in the state. The consistency of this local’s perception with meteorological data was also evaluated. The annual mean temperature had increased at a rate of 0.027 and 0.024 °C/year in the valley and hill, respectively, while the annual precipitation declined at a rate of 0.08 and 0.12 mm/year in the valley and hill, respectively, in the past 44 years (1979–2022). The results reveal an overall consistency between local community perceptions of climate change and the scientific observations of these changes. A better understanding of how communities perceive climate change would enable decision-makers to devise local adaptation measures and formulate an effective mitigation strategy that efficiently tackles the negative impact of climate change impacts.