Apart from modeling and quantitative analysis of climate change, it is also important to understand what local communities feel about climate change and how they are affected by it and are responding to those impacts in order to bring new policies and programmes in the particular area. This paper tries to analyze the connection between perceived changes in different attributes of climate change by the local people residing in peri-urban areas of Kathmandu Valley and the results obtained from analysis of recorded temperature and rainfall data of seven different hydro-meteorological stations located in different parts of Kathmandu Valley. Besides, the study also explores the impact of climate change on the local people and their responses in order to enhance their resilience. The study is based on focus group discussions with communities and household survey whereas the analysis of hydro-meteorological data is done in R software.
The perception of most of the local people on changes in temperature is almost in line with the recorded long term climatic trend whereas the perception of decreasing monsoon and non-monsoon rainfall is not matched with the recorded data as it did not find any long term clear visible pattern of rainfall. However, out of seven stations, four illustrated decreasing trend in number of rainy days in non-monsoon and three stations demonstrated decreasing trend of rainy days in the monsoon period. People have been facing several impacts from these changes such as decrease in water sources, decrease in agricultural crop production, increase in insect-pest attack and increase in weeds in agricultural crops. Local people are responding to these impacts basedon their own skills and traditional knowledge. Household level water management, adoption of innovative technologies in agricultural practice, construction of wells, changing cropping pattern and systems and occupational diversification are some important responses they are adopting to adapt to the impacts of changes in climate.