The frequency of the occurrence of the hazard is increasing. In farmers' view, the main reasons are changing climatic conditions. High temperature and no rain invite longer droughts. The severity of these hazards would further increase in near future affecting particularly to productive land and community's assets like road, irrigation canal, school, markets, etc. The occurrence of different hazards not only challenged the people's lives and livelihood but also destroyed the land and communities assets at local level. The hazards also affect in social environment. In the recent years, there are more cases of seasonal and permanent migration thus the workloads of elderly, women and children particularly have increased. Due to constant fear and losses of assets from the various hazards, tendency of shifting occupation from on- farm to off- farm is common. With the tendency of continuous crop failure, people usually sell their land even in cheaper price and divert to small-scale business. With the increasing trends of climatic hazards, evidences were also observed on conflict of indigenous and migrant population about the resource sharing. The outbreak of many respiratory and vector borne diseases such as Malaria, Dengue, Japanese Encephalitis, Kala-azar and communicable diseases like cough, cold, eye infection, etc were also perceived by the people.
The inputs for improved farming system are irrigation, seeds and seeding materials, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and agriculture loan. Local market (haat bazaar), DADO, DLSO, local NGOs, Indian market, cooperative, private shop and agro vet are the main sources where the farmers get the inputs. The DADO and DSLO have been providing technical trainings to farmer groups along with some inputs in promoting skills and knowledge. Agriculture Development Bank (Nepal) has been providing loan to the farmers. With the growing number of Saving and Credit groups and cooperatives, farmers prefer to take loan from these institutions because of lower interest rates. Inadequate knowledge, ignorance, poor market information system, complicated process of accessing loan from institutions is some of the hindering factors for using lesser inputs.
Rainwater, surface irrigation, Swallow Tube Well, conservation pond, etc are some of the sources for irrigation. However, the reliability of irrigation facilities is also in decreasing trend. The reasons are frequent flood, longer droughts, depletion of forest resource in Churia area and irregular rainfall patterns. The longer droughts are responsible to lowering the ground water table, which affected the poor performance of deep and shallow tube-wells in terai. With the increasing sedimentation through high soil erosion in upstream, there is a seepage problem of water hence farmers are unable to divert the water from the river into the canal.
Farmers have inadequate knowledge and skills on improved farming like proper use of chemical fertilizer, early variety selection, application of pesticide (time and amount), seed and nursery management and off-season vegetable production, soil fertility management techniques and post harvest technologies. Poor marketing skills and information is another constraint. Farmers of terai are affected by subsidy policy made by the Indian government to its farmers on seeds, fertilizers, and irrigational facilities. Hence Nepali farmers are unable to compete with Indian farmers while selling the agriculture products. Maize, wheat and paddy are the major crops. Production trend of maize is in increasing trend in mid-hills while productivity of paddy is in increasing trend in terai. The production trends of wheat are increasing in the mid-hills. The declining productivity of oil crops is perceived in all the study villages.
Erratic rainfall has negative impacts on agriculture and other sectors in both mid-hill and terai. Majority of the people opined that there are changes in rainfall pattern. Interestingly, change in rainfall month as well as the negative impacts of decrease in rainfall are similar in both mid-hill and terai districts. The change pattern of hailstone is more observed in mid-hills. People have clearly experienced the changing pattern of temperature in both mid-hills and terai regions. Looking at the impacts of increased temperature pattern, there are negative impacts in people's lives and livelihood. People have experienced the impacts of climate change but they have poor knowledge about its exact reasons.
