As a result of a dramatic decline in world coffee prices and the restructuring of both domestic and international institutions, coffee farmers have been facing one of the most difficult periods in sector history. In 2003, a comparative case study project (supported by the Small Grant Program of the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research) in Guatemala, Mexico and Honduras explored the experiences and responses of coffee farmers to institutional reforms, market risk, and climate variability. Four communities were selected for study in the 3 countries in which household surveys and interviews were conducted. The impacts of the crisis and farmers' responses illustrate the potential obstacles that farmers confront with sudden and profound changes in production conditions, yet also suggest opportunities for interventions that might help farmers improve their resilience to future risk.

Global warming is likely to lead to a variety of changes in local climatic conditions, including potential increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme climatic events such as drought, floods, and storms. Present capacity to respond to and manage climatic variability, including extreme events, is an important component of adjustments to climatic changes. In particular, identifying and addressing constraints on local adaptation mechanisms—whether political, economic or social in nature—is critical to developing effective adaptation policies. The drylands of Kenya present great survival challenges to the people living in these areas. The hilltops in the drylands provide favorable climate and resources for adapting to climate change. The present paper examines the role that one particular hilltop, Endau in Kitui District, eastern Kenya, plays in processes of local adaptation to climatic variability and drought. The project presented here investigated how conflict and exclusion from key hilltop resources constrain adaptation among the population groups living around the hilltop, and how these constraints are negotiated, addressed, or even exacerbated through institutional arrangements and development activities.

Climate change is happening and people have begun to feel its impacts on their daily lives. Clear indications of these impacts can be seen on Himalayan glaciers, which are melting at rapid rates and consequently form massive glacial lakes (Figure 1), with a risk of catastrophic glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs). GLOFs result in loss of lives, property, and costly infrastructure, as well as displacement of local people. They represent a particular threat in Nepal, where resources are already scarce. In least developed countries (LDCs) like Nepal, where poverty reduction is a national priority, the impact of climate change appears to be an obstacle to the process of sustainable development. Institutionalizing the climate change issue in national policies has now become an urgent need rather than a choice. As a signatory to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Nepal has agreed to take climate change considerations into account in its national development agenda. The first step was the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol; the second is building the necessary institutional services such as a Designated National Authority (DNA), which is in the process of establishment. Moreover, climate change policies and strategies, the interconnections between different sectors, and coordination among different line ministries and government departments are issues to be addressed in the near future. WWF has initiated a Climate Witness Project to raise national and international awareness, and supports national efforts to shape adequate institutional responses to climate change.

Since the extremely dry and hot summer of 2003, the question of what effects ongoing climate change will have on hydropower in Switzerland—mainly on the amount of electricity that will be produced, but also on the safety of hydropower plants—has often arisen. Even though predictions of the potential impacts of climate change on hydropower generation are characterized by uncertainty, it can be assumed that within the next 25 to 30 years no significant adaptation of the infrastructure for hydropower generation will be urgently needed in Switzerland. Therefore, there are no major institutional challenges to be faced in this context. On the other hand, extending hydropower generation units to further reduce the emission of greenhouse gases will constitute a challenge to existing institutional arrangements, in Switzerland and elsewhere. In the case of Switzerland, interest in protecting waterways and landscapes will conflict with future efforts to mitigate climate change. Current legislation is based on sectoral considerations and not on a holistic vision of sustainable development. Thus this framework has some shortcomings in terms of constructive negotiation of processes leading towards long-term sustainable development.

The impacts of the 1997–1998 El Niño rains in the Mount Kenya region were heterogeneously distributed among agricultural villages in the area. The magnitude of these impacts on crop production depended on differences in the climatic and topographic conditions of the affected villages. Major food crops, especially beans and Irish potatoes, were ruined by the long-lasting rains in all villages, whereas banana and root crops, with the exception of Irish potatoes, received minimal damage. Because the less-susceptible crops were planted mainly in relatively humid villages on the upper slopes of the mountain, the differences in the impacts on the long-established upper and more recently settled lower villages became more apparent. Floods caused crop losses on the lower slopes but also deposited seeds of a useful tree species, resulting in a positive long-term impact of the El Niño rains. Farmers considered the El Niño rains to be much worse than a heavier rainfall event, the Mafuriko rains, experienced in 1961, suggesting that the magnitude of rainfall impact may not necessarily be determined by the amount of rainfall.

In the late 1990s widespread evidence of glacier expansion was found in the central Karakoram, in contrast to a worldwide decline of mountain glaciers. The expansions were almost exclusively in glacier basins from the highest parts of the range and developed quickly after decades of decline. Exceptional numbers of glacier surges were also reported. Unfortunately, there has been no on-going measurement of climatic or glaciological variables at these elevations. The present article examines possible explanations for this seemingly anomalous behavior, using evidence from short-term monitoring programs, low-altitude weather stations, and the distinctive environmental characteristics of the region. The latter involve interactions between regional air mass climatology, its seasonality, topoclimate or ‘verticality’ effects on glaciers with extreme altitudinal range, climatic sensitivities of heavy versus thin supraglacial debris, and complex temperature distributions in ice masses with ice falls throughout critical elevations. Valley climate stations indicate increases in precipitation over the past 50 years and small declines in summer temperatures, which may indicate positive trends in glacier mass balance. However, the suddenness of the expansions is problematic, as is their confinement to glaciers from the highest watersheds while others continue to retreat. Thermal shifts in ice masses with extreme altitude ranges may be even more critical, leading to an accelerated redistribution of ice mass by elevation.

Archival data of monthly air temperature and precipitation series were used to investigate climate change trends and characteristics during 1960–2000 at 19 stations along Lancang River from the north to the south, in the mountainous Himalayan region of southwest China. The magnitude of a trend was estimated using Sen's Nonparametric Estimator of Slope approach. The station significance of a trend was assessed by the MK test. Over the observation period of 41 years, mean annual air temperature increased at the rate of 0.01°C/yr to 0.04°C/yr in 12 stations at the significance level α = 0.01. The changes in precipitation in different areas are very dissimilar and complex. Mean annual precipitation that decreased from −2.86mm/yr to −5.29mm/yr at 3 stations, and mean annual precipitation that increased from 5.77mm/yr and 7.44mm/yr at 2 stations, were statistically significant at the significance level α = 0.05. The lower reaches of Lancang River experienced much more severe temperature increase, precipitation decrease, and drought development than the upper reaches in the past 41 years.

Space-borne satellite imagery is increasingly used for classifying and characterizing forest cover in mountain environments. Using medium resolution satellite imagery, acquired over an industrial mountain area near the city of Naeba, in the central part of Honshu, Japan, this study attempts to characterize forest cover types situated in an area affected by prolonged anthropogenic land use and land cover change (LUCC) processes. The image was topographically corrected, and training sites selected and assessed for their spectral separability between forest classes. Using the ground truthed training sites and a supervised spectral angle mapper (SAM) classifier, dominant forest cover types were classified. Post-classification forest cover classification accuracies range between 77–89%. Results highlight how an assessment of the spectral separability of forest cover types prior to image classification, combined with ground validation that focuses on documenting and noting areas affected by human modifications to the forest, can aid in refining the forest classification training areas, which in turn can lead to improved image classification accuracies. Through refinement of the training areas used in the classification via ground truthing, it is possible to account for localized land use and land cover disturbances (ie forest harvesting, thinning) that create non-representative training areas. It is then possible to select additional training areas that are more representative of a forest spectral class and not a localized anomaly created via human disturbance.

Agricultural market reforms initiated by successive Venezuelan governments in the 1990s have triggered a complex set of coping strategies in the Venezuelan Andes. A case study in the Pueblo Llano valley showed that some of the most important livelihood strategies used by farming households to cope with economic uncertainty during the period of research (1994–1999) were land expansion, plot dispersion, and an increase in sharecropping arrangements. However, in constructing these strategies, farming households had to draw on social and cultural resources (ie kinship) as a mechanism to access more land, inputs, and labor.

Using twenty years of statistical data and household survey data from 1998 to 2001, this paper examines the link between socioeconomic factors and conservation of agrobiodiversity in fallow agroecosystems in two small rural villages, Daka and Baka, in Xishuangbanna, southwest China. These communities have long practiced traditional fallow field, or swidden agriculture, which has maintained a high degree of agrobiodiversity. However, we found that the area of fallow fields is dropping annually by 0.008 ha per capita in Daka and 0.001 ha in Baka. This loss seems to be driven by population increase and the loss of fallow lands to rubber plantation, paddy field, and other high-yield, income-generating crops that are strongly affected by market trends and government policy. In addition, many farmers are reducing the duration of fallow and increasing the amount of time that land is under cultivation. The loss of fallow agriculture means a loss in agrobiodiversity, as the traditional variety of crops and plants is replaced by exotic varieties with great ecological tolerance. In Baka in 1999 there were 20 upland rice varieties; by 2001 this number had dropped to 14 varieties. There is an urgent need to maintain the diversity and knowledge tied to fallow agroecosystems. Practical innovations by the expert farmers that conserve agrobiodiversity are particularly valuable and need to be encouraged.

The Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) recently prepared a short orientation paper, entitled Addressing Climate Change Through Development Cooperation, with a focus on natural resource management, livelihoods, and food security. This document illustrates how the issue of climate change can be addressed and integrated into the work of an agency. In SDC's programs, special emphasis is given to two important areas—adaptation and mitigation—as well as to the linkages between policy levels and concrete development work.