Climate exerts a profound influence on the lives of rural populations, particularly the rural poor, who depend on agriculture for livelihood and sustenance, who are unprotected against climate-related diseases, who lack secure access to water and food, and who are vulnerable to hydrometeorological hazard. Climate shocks such as drought and flooding lead not only to loss of life, but also long-t...

In tropical countries, upland forests, mid-elevation and lowland agriculture and coastal zones used to provide most if not all of the goods and services that local populations relied on for their livelihood. The forests provided necessary building materials as well as supplies for boat construction, and a host of food products and medicinal plants. The lowland areas provided all agricultural st...

Central America continues to be a violent region and is prone to increasing climatic shocks and environmental degradation. This paper explores the non-linear feedback loop between violence and climate shocks on livelihood resilience in El Salvador and Honduras, two countries experiencing high rates of violence. The nature of this complex feedback loop is examined by analysing case studies on th...

iv Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Ecology ....................................................................... 2 Soil/fertilizer ....................................................................... 3 Economics ....................................................................... 4 Illegal Practices ....................................................................... 6 Nutrition and Liveli...

Drought and famine in Sub-Saharan Africa is among the leading contributory causes of vulnerability in pastoral communities. This paper discusses approaches that allow understanding of pastoral indigenous adaptive strategies to drought and famine. It is argued that understanding pastoral livelihood strategies requires a holistic approach. The paper focused on three key approaches namely: sustain...

Most current approaches to landscape scale ecosystem service assessments rely on detailed secondary data. This type of data is seldom available in regions with high levels of poverty and strong local dependence on provisioning ecosystem services for livelihoods. We develop a method to extrapolate results from a previously published village scale ecosystem services assessment to a higher adminis...

The net impact of development interventions can depend on the availability of close substitutes to the intervention. We analyze a randomized trial of an innovative anti-poverty program in South India which provides “ultra-poor” households with inputs to create a new, sustainable livelihood. We find no statistically significant evidence of lasting net impact on consumption, income or asset accum...

We present amethodological approach for constructing an agent-basedmodel (ABM) to assess community food security and variation among livelihood trajectories, using rural Malawi as a case study. The approach integrates both quantitative and qualitative data to explore how interactions between households and the environment lead to the emergence of community food availability, access, utilisation...

This study analyses public attitudes towards the degree of government involvement in ensuring the livelihood and care of the elderly in Japan. Using four waves of individual-level annual data from the Japanese General Social Survey collected over the period 2000-2005, we estimate ordered logit models with various explanatory variables based on the socio-demographic, economic, political, and soc...