South Asia

By guest blogger S. Gopikrishna Warrier

What can be done today to protect South Asia’s agriculture from climate change impacts occurring in 2020?

To find crafty and viable solutions to this question, experts from Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka joined forces with the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) South Asia, in Dhaka, Bangladesh in late February of this year. Read more »

by Miranda Morgan

I had just arrived at our training venue in Dhaka and watched as the manager stood at the top of the stairs, violently screaming orders at the woman rushing around to help me. When I expressed my distaste for his behavior, especially on my behalf, he smiled and explained why he felt he could treat her like that. “Don’t worry”, he said, “she’s just the cleaning lady”.

A few days later, the research assistants we are working with to implement the study were struggling to learn one particular research tool. One of the few women in the group bravely attempted to facilitate the session but it was not an easy task. Smirking, one of the men observing the exercise pointedly said to us, “this is what you get as a result of affirmative action”, as if the failure of the exercise was her fault and an obvious consequence of involving women in the research.

The irony that both of these incidents occurred as we conducted training for a study investigating power relations between and among men and women was not lost on me. Read more »

by PK Aggarwal, GD Bhatta, PK Joshi, SA Prathapar, ML Jat, P Mathur and M Kadian

Recently, the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Climate Change (CCAFS) introduced the model of ”Climate Smart Villages (CSVs)”. The idea was to raise awareness among farming communities in South Asia about various  technological, institutional and policy-oriented options that have the potential to increase their climatic resilience, adaptation, agricultural productivity and income, while reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.

Interventions that were made, related to weather, water, carbon, nutrient, energy and knowledge management, are currently being evaluated by the farming communities in a participatory way. Read more »

by Floriane Clement

International climate change debates are often based upon simplistic assumptions of how men and women perceive and address risks and uncertainty. For instance, women are commonly portrayed as a homogenous group who are always more vulnerable than men to climate change simply because they are women. Yet the relationship between gender, poverty and vulnerability is neither straightforward, nor universal (Arora-Jonsson, 2011).

Just to illustrate, in some areas of Nepal it was found that poor women from landless households are more likely to attend community meetings and speak up because they feel less constrained by social norms than women from higher class and caste (Agarwal, 2010). They have therefore a higher capability to influence community decisions that might affect their vulnerability. Read more »