The implications of rural perceptions of water scarcity on differential adaptation behaviour in Rajasthan, India

Water scarcity is one of the most critical issues facing agriculture today. To understand how people manage the risk of water scarcity and growing pressures of increased climate variability, exploring perceptions of risk and how these perceptions feed into response behaviour and willingness to adapt is critical. This paper revisits existing frameworks that conceptualise perceptions of environmental risk and decision-making, and uses empirical evidence from an in-depth study conducted in Rajasthan, India, to emphasise how individual and collective memories, and experience of past extreme events shape current definitions and future expectations of climatic risks. In doing so, we demonstrate the value of recognising the role of local perceptions of water scarcity (and how they vary between and within households) in constructing social vulnerability. We also discuss the implications of these perceptions of risk when understanding and incentivising local adaptation pathways

Perceptions of Environmental Change and Migration Decisions

While climate change is projected to increase displacement of people, knowledge on this issue remains limited and fragmented. In his paper we focus on the micro-level and study the effects of individual perceptions of different types of environmental events (i.e., sudden/short-term vs. slow-onset/long-term) on migration decisions. Our results based on newly collected micro-level survey data from Vietnam shows that while slow-onset environmental events, such as droughs, significantly decrease the likelihood of migration, short-term events, such as floods, are positively related to migration, although not in a statistically significant way. When contrasting individual level perceptions with actual climatic events we observe that migrants and non-migrants perceive both long-term as well as sudden-onset environmental events in different ways. While non-migrants are slightly better in judging the actual extremeness of events such as floods and hurricanes, it is the migrants who are slightly better in judging the actual extremeness in the case of droughts