Jyotish Prakash Basu
Dept. of Economics, West Bengal State University, West Bengal,India

Traditional local knowledge plays an integral role in building climate resilience. Climate change has increasing impacts on rural poor populations, threatening lives, food security, agricultural production and the forest on which people depend for their subsistence. Communities apply traditional knowledge in early warning systems that calculate risks or detect extreme weather events, droughts or floods. They use it in adapting subsistence strategies for agriculture, fishing and forestry, improving water and resource management; enhancing ecosystems; selecting which resources to use to mitigate or adapt to climate change effects.

The paper addresses two responses to climate change. One is mitigation and other is adaptation. The importance of reducing emission from deforestation and forest degradation has assumed to be a cost effective mitigation option of the climate change debate. In India, deforestation and degradation of forest is the result of illicit felling of trees, illegal encroachments, forest fire, over exploitation of forest products and poverty. Water resource is also threatened by climate change and the shortage of water is acute in the drought prone areas of India. The government of India has adopted Joint Forest Management (JFM) as a principal approach for community-based forestry. Under Joint Forest management (JFM) the effective involvement of village communities in evolving sustainable forest management systems has been looked upon as an important approach to address the long-standing problems of deforestation and land degradation in India.

The objectives of the study are three fold. First is how Joint forest management (JFM) helped to reduce illicit felling of trees, reduce area under illegal encroachments, forest fire prevention and control through the involvement of local communities. Second is to examine household’s adaptation options to reduce the adverse effect of climate change. In addition, the paper addresses the local knowledge of the forest dependent community to harvest and conserve the scarce water resources in the drought area.

This paper is an empirical study based on data collected through field survey. This study covers four villages- and Bandhgaba, Dhansimla, Rangakula, Khayarakura, both are scheduled tribe and scheduled caste based villages located in Sonamukhi forest area in the District of Bankura, one of the drought prone districts of West Bengal, consisting of 100 households in 2010. The results of the study revealed that the carbon sequestration rates in regenerating forests under joint forest management systems ranged from 3.5 metric tons of carbon per hectare per year in the Western Ghats to 5.4 mt C per hectare annually in southwest Bengal. Second, the existing Joint Forest Management program reduced the forest fire through the community involvement. Third, incidence of illicit felling of trees has declined in JFM areas of West Bengal. JFM has helped to reduce area under illegal encroachments. The over extraction of fuelwood is completely prohibitive in the JFM areas. The local communities are taking interest and participating in watershed development, mainly to get additional water supply for drinking and irrigation. The household’s adaptation options like migration, formation of self-help group (SHGs), accessibility of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) and livestock rearing have been identified in order to reduce the climate change impact. This paper has important policy implications for poverty, livelihood, sustainable forest management and climate strategy.