Extreme weather events may have a very different impact on the population exposed. While a hurricane overriding the East Coast of the United States might cause only a few casualties, a cyclone of similar magnitude may result in thousands of deaths in South Asia.

According to the Inter Governmental Panel on Climate Change, it is the differences in the adaptive capacity of a community that result in such different outcomes. Its main determinants are economic wealth, access to technology, education, infrastructure, institutions and equity. Such factors tend to be weaker in less developed regions, and consequently the ability to cope with extreme events is less.

In view of the growing number of extreme events worldwide, due to climate change, sophisticated social research methods are being developed to assess and ultimately improve, a specific region’s adaptive capacity.

Dr. Amalendu Jyotishi, Associate Professor, Department of Management, Bangalore campus and Dr. Sushanta Kumar Mahapatra, Associate Professor, Department of Management, Kochi campus will participate as co-investigators in a research project titled The Role of Rural Institutions in Enabling Adaptation to Climate Change in the Agricultural Sector across Different Ecosystems in India.

Other researchers involved are Dr. G. Sridevi, Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, University of Hyderabad (principal investigator) and Dr. Satyasiba Bedamatta, Assistant Professor, Center for Ecological Economics and Natural Resources, Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore.

For the study, the Indian Council for Social Sciences Research (ICCSSR) approved a grant-in-aid of Rs. 7,00,000.

“The poor are forced to live in susceptible regions, which expose them to either floods or droughts and different diseases, as compared to wealthier people. Our study intends to compute vulnerability covering climatic change, demographic and social, occupational, common property resources and agricultural dimensions across different ecosystems in India. It also proposes to analyze the adaptive capacities across different ecosystems, social groups, different farming systems, etc,” the researchers explained.

The ultimate aim of the project is to construct a vulnerability index for ecosystems and rank each ecosystem in terms of their performance on the index. The aim encompasses understanding various types of existing rural institutions and how these could be strengthened for the overall use and management of all ecosystem services, in rural areas.

Another ASB project focussing on climate change received an ICSSR grant of Rs 5.2 lakhs. Titled, Globalization, Climate Change and Urban Public Finance: An Empirical Study of Bombay and Delhi Municipal Corporations, the two-year project will be led by Prof. Shyam Nath of the Department of Management, Amritapuri campus.

April 22, 2013
Department of Management
@ Amritapuri, Kochi and Bengaluru