Beyond Climate Change: Impacts, Adaptation Strategies, and Influencing Factors

Abstract

Climate change is considered as one of the most severe and common environmental phenomena. This phenomenon has had the most damaging effects on the local-agricultural communities due to its impact on employment, income sources, and agricultural products. The livelihoods of more than half of the local poor communities depend on this sector and are hence more vulnerable to climate change. This issue is especially prominent in underdeveloped and developing countries. This chapter investigates the impacts of climate change to identify strategies for adaptation of local and agricultural communities to this phenomenon and to describe the influencing constructs on the acceptance of those strategies. The investigation has been completed in three stages, including identifying and explaining the most critical impacts of climate change, identifying and introducing methods for adaptation of local and agricultural communities to climate change, and identifying and introducing constructs affecting adaptation strategies’ adoption.Adocumentary research method based on reviewing and analysing various studies around the world was adopted to delve deeper into the topic. The first stage analysis showed that endangering human health, reducing food security, aggravating water shortages, damaging vital infrastructure, cultural shocks, deviating from sustainable development goals, threatening the territorial integrity of the countries, increasing local-regional conflicts resources over common pool resources, increasing internal and external migration, intensifying droughts, and increasing poverty in local communities are among the most important impacts of climate change. The second stage investigation demonstrated that the adaptation strategies to climate change could be divided into economic/social management, water resources management, and crop management strategies. The third stage investigations showed that the socio-economic, natural, human, physical, institutional, psychological, and agricultural constructs are the most critical factors affecting adaptation to climate change. Some practical suggestions were also presented to increase the adaptation of future climate change.