Download Chilika Climate Vulnerability

ABSTRACT
Assessing vulnerability of wetlands to climate change – developing
a framework for Lake Chilika, India
Ritesh Kumar1 and Ajit Patnaik2
International South Asia, New Delhi, India: Email – [email protected]
Development Authority, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India
1 Wetlands
2 Chilika
Wetlands, through their ability to regulate hydrological regimes, buffer extreme
events, providing water and food security and supporting a range of biodiversity,
have inherent capabilities to support climate change adaptation. Yet, their integration
into climate change adaptation policies and programmes remains a major challenge.
A key reason for this gap is weak body of research on vulnerability analysis of
wetlands as coupled socio-ecological systems. Much of the climate related research
has focused on bio-physical aspects of impact as they are expected to manifest with
wetland components and processes, with very limited extension in portraying
vulnerability as a property of a socio-ecological system, and seeking to elaborate the
mechanisms and processes in a coupled manner. The three year IDRC supported
project ‘Strengthening livelihood security and adapting to climate uncertainty in
Chilika Lagoon, India’ aims to address this gap using Lake Chilika, a brackishwater
coastal lagoon in Orissa State as a case study.
Lake Chilika, a Ramsar Site, is a hotspot of biodiversity supporting one of the largest
migratory bird congregations within Central Asian Flyway, a healthy population of
globally endangered Irrawaddy Dolphin, as well as the base of livelihood security of
more than 0.2 million fishers and 0.4 million farmers living in and around the wetland
and its associated floodplains. Management of Chilika is aimed at achieving wise
use defined within the text of Ramsar Convention as “maintenance of ecological
character through implementation of ecosystem approaches, within the context of
sustainable development”.
The methodological framework adopted for assessing vulnerability of Lake Chilika to
climate change focused on assessing the degree to which the wetland ecosystem is
sensitive to and unable to adapt to or moderate the consequences of climate change
and other (anthropocentric) pressures on its ecological character. Further, to provide
a fuller mapping of the core and proximate factors influencing vulnerability, the
framework decouples the overall ecological character vulnerability into two
interlinked biophysical and social assessment components. The biophysical
vulnerability assessment focuses on ecological character in more physical sense,
akin to the conventional physical vulnerability assessment. Social vulnerability
assessment on the other hand focuses on the exposure of communities living in and
around the wetland system to the impacts of hazards. The ultimate objective of both
these assessment processes is to identify risk management strategies and
developing response options within an adaptive management framework. The
preliminary outcomes of application of the framework on Lake Chilika are discussed.