According to Berry et al., farmers’ health is a critical component of their ability to adapt to climate change; thus, providing improved health care facilities would be a useful support tool for the Dalsinghpara village.Most of the households having a moderate and high adaptive capacity level are found in the Ballalguri village.This village has scored well in most capital assets except for the main road accessibility during the monsoon season.During the rainy season, the village becomes isolated from the rest of the district since all roads get submerged under the water.Moreover, there are no bridges over the rivers in this area, and the river bed is used as a means of transportation.Consequently, during the monsoon months, access to health care units and marketplaces becomes extremely difficult, and sample farmers from the Ballalguri village stated that they need to stockpile dry foods for this period in order to survive.However, the rivers are mainly rainfed and remain dry the rest of the year.Therefore, improving road conditions, especially in this area, should help to reduce the vulnerability.This result is consistent with the empirical findings of Nelson et al.and Choden et al., which stressed the need for investments towards the improvements of the rural roads for enhancing the adaptive capacity of the farmers.Improvement of physical capital would provide households with more opportunities not only for making profits via better farming practices but also for generating incomes from offfarm and non-farm activities.This would help enhance the adaptive capacity of rural households in these areas by diversifying their income sources.The households having a high level of adaptive capacity also attained relatively higher scores in financial capital.
Also, the households having at least one member working outside face lesser financial stress,stacking pots and they are relatively less vulnerable.However, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic and lock downs to prevent the spread of such a deadly infection, many migrants were forced to return to their villages.In 14.77 percent of the surveyed households, the respondents stated that their household members lost work during the pandemic and were unable to find alternative employment owing to a lack of employment opportunities.Apart from these, access to credit is comparatively high amongst the high adaptive capacity households.Although, only 7.38 percent of the households accessed credit during the last five years.Low educational level, distance to the formal financial institutes, and lack of land ownership rights could be constraints for accessing the credit facilities.It was also found that the farmers who owned larger farms had more adaptive capacity.Likewise, Jamshidi et al.reported that larger landholders are less vulnerable due to their higher adaptive capacity.However, our study also pointed out that soil quality and land ownership are more important than the landholding size.In this line, the households with higher adaptive capacity also scored more in the aforementioned natural capital indicators.Adaptation to climate change at the agricultural level entails farmers’ strategies/measures to reduce their crop damage or utilize different beneficial opportunities in response to the current or expected impacts of climate change.However, it is difficult to compile all of these strategies and determine whether or not those are climate induced.Therefore, in this study, firstly, we identified the local-level climatic stressors and finally reported the farm-level adaptation measures that are specifically targeted to minimize the impacts of the identified stressors.In Fig.6, different adaptation measures as opted by the farming households from different levels of adaptive capacity have been reported.A large number of farming households with low adaptive capacity from the village Turturi Khanda left their land as fallow as their land has filled with stones and pebbles from flood, making it uncultivable.Whereas the households whose landholdings are partially infertile cultivate paddy in small land that is not affected by the floods, and some also planted woody trees like Teak and Sal in those flood-affected lands.
These woody trees, according to the respondents, are quite resistant to flooding and pest attacks and also generate additional income for the household.Likewise, Dhungana et al.also reported that several farmers from the Nepal Himalaya planted trees in response to floods.The moderate and higher adaptive capacity households were found growing different crops and trees such as paddy, areca nuts, and woody trees.Meanwhile, only one sample household in the TurturiKhanda village had access to irrigation water by means of channeling the spring water into the field.In the Dalsinghpara village, irrespective of the adaptive capacity, all the households switched from the cultivation of traditional cereals to cash crops.The respondents reported that they perceived an irregular and decreased rainfall which was not sufficient for paddy cultivation.Over the years, low rainfall in the region coupled with decreased yields and pest intensifications have induced farmers to stop cultivating the cereals and moving to less water-intensive cash crops like areca nuts , black pepper , cassava , and pineapple.All these crops are low maintenance and increased households’ income.Similarly, a shift from traditional staple cereals to commercial crops in the Western-Himalayan landscape was reported in Rana et al.and.Some farmers also planted different woody trees to increase their income which requires minimal water and low maintenance.All the horticultural crops and woods are sold to the wholesalers, who collect those directly from the farms or households.The sample households from Dalsinghpara village mainly use watering buckets to water in their fields as there were no improved irrigation facilities.Both the moderate and high adaptive capacity households from the Ballalguri village were found to be engaged in paddy cultivation, and a large proportion of them also diversified their production system by planting areca nuts.Plantation of areca nut as a commercial crop recently became popular in the Sub-Himalayan region of West Bengal.As few households have access to improved irrigation facilities , paddy cultivation is mainly done in the monsoon season only.Also, all the sample households are found to use shorter-duration varieties of paddy as traditional varieties are no longer available in the markets.The farmers also reported that the onset and withdrawal of monsoon have become irregular, and they alter their transplantation of paddy as per the arrival of monsoon for obtaining the benefits of natural rainfall.
Changing the transplanting date as an adaptation measure is widely reported throughout the world.All the sample households who grow paddy also sow a higher quantity of seeds in order to get some extra paddy seedlings.These excess seedlings are re-transplanted if the previously transplanted seedlings are damaged due to heavy rainfalls.Whereas during the time of harvesting, if households face crop failure due to heavy rainfall, they usually dry the wet paddy, and later on, depending on the quality, those are either used for their own consumption or as animal fodder.The farmers also reported that during the non-monsoon period, this area faces a water crisis; however, as the households diversified their production by incorporating areca nuts and by selling these nuts, their vulnerability has significantly reduced.Even those households which are not cultivating areca nuts are planning to invest in it.On the other hand, irrespective of perceiving increased pest attacks, the application of chemical pesticides was limited in all the villages as the farmers believed that chemicals would deteriorate soil fertility.The contribution of greenhouse gasses from agriculture is estimated to be 11−15% of the entire emissions.In which, the release from agricultural soils and rice cultivation report 39% and 9% of the total release, respectively.Nitrous oxide , which accounts for a third of the agricultural sector GHG emissions, has a global warming potential of 265 over a hundred year lifespan.The potential for N2O emissions increases when the availability of N rises because it is claimed that N2O production in agricultural soil arises mostly through the microbial transformation of inorganic N.Until 2030, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – IPCC evaluates that GHG emissions will increase by 35% to 60%.The increasing GHG emissions from paddy cultivation have become a major concern in recent years.It is reported that, together with the intensive farming policy, the total GHG emissions from the agriculture sector in Vietnam increased significantly from 1994 to 2013.specifically, the emissions were at 52.4, 65.1, 88.3, 89.4 million tons of CO2 equivalent in 1994, 2000, 2010, and 2013, respectively.According to the data reported in the two national GHG emission inventories in 2010 and 2013,sawtooth greenhouse the amount of emitted CO2 from irrigated rice cultivation increased from 41.31 million tons to 42.51 million tons, respectively.In addition, the direct N2O emissions from agricultural soils increased from 12.91 million tons in 2010 to 13.17 million tons in 2013.Therefore, the most important criterion in the socioeconomic development progress of Vietnam and the Mekong Delta is to develop crops that simultaneously ensure food production and reduce GHG emissions.Regarding N2O flux from agricultural soils, a significant source of this effusion comes from the consumption of synthetic N fertilizers in crop cultivating steps.Chai et al.recognized the application of N as the major cause to direct N2O emissions.In paddy cultivation, increasing N use increases 4.56–7.11 g N2O/kg N of the seasonal N2O flux; the GWP also shows a squared reaction to N rate, peaking at 122–130 kg N/ ha.
Moreover, the experiments by Zhang et al.in China helped to calculate the cumulative N2O emissions during the 2011 growing season under different levels of N application.The results were at 23.09, 40.10, and 71.08 mg N2O/m2 at low-150 kg/ha, moderate-210 kg/ha and high-300 kg/ha of N application, respectively.Thus, it is recommended that the cultivators should reduce the high N fertilizer application in order to lessen the GWP while the optimum paddy yield is still maintained.It is claimed that the intensive farming and expanded demand scenario create such an extreme pressure on the rice fields, thereby causing soil degradation and imbalanced paddy ecosystem resulting in increasing environmental GHG emissions.About 90% of the world’s rice is produced by Asian countries , and 90% of the CH4 produced in the world’s paddy fields comes from this region.For this reason, understanding the CH4 and N2O release mechanisms in rice fields is necessary for developing well-organized strategies and changing conventional crop management regimes.Therefore, reducing GHG emissions becomes potential.Zou et al., with their on- field assessment, concluded that the seasonal total N2O is equivalent to 0.02% of the nitrogen applied under continuous flooding of paddy fields.The emission factor of nitrogen for N2O was proposed to be 0.42% from the result of the ordinary least squared regression model.Moreover, Yan et al.also indicated that CH4 emissions are significantly affected by organic fertilizer modification and water regimes in the growing seasons.Regarding the climate smart strategies for paddy cultivation, controlled irrigation or the alternative wetting and drying 1 technique is believed to be effective for mitigating the CO2 equivalents of CH4 and N2O emissions from fields.Multiple drainage , a simplified form of AWD, has also been practiced in the MKD.Uno et al.evaluated the consequence of this technique on yield and GHG emissions in paddy fields in An Giang province, where full dike systems are constructed for fresh water paddy production.The authors concluded that multiple drainage system can at the same time improve the output and reduce CH4 emissions in paddy fields if it is adequately implemented.Specifically, MD fields report a significant increase at 22% in yield compared to traditional flooding fields.Although there is no difference in N2O emissions found, seasonal total CH4 emissions were markedly declined by 35% in MD plots.A study of CH4 measurement by Vo et al.was conducted in paddy farms from different agro-ecological zones of the MKD.Through the emissions collected by using the closed chamber method, the overall emission factor of the entire delta is approximately 1.92 kg CH4/ha/day, which is about 48% higher compared to the globally default value set by the IPCC.However, this study by Vo et al.did not record the difference in farming patterns.Interestingly, the rice-beef-biogas integrated system presented in the study by Ogino et al.is believed to mitigate GHG emissions and energy consumption compared to the specialized rice and beef production system in Vietnam.Hanh et al.evaluated the nitrogen use efficiency of six rice varieties, including Chiem Tay, Te Tep, Re Bac Ninh, IR24, P6DB, and Khang Dan 18 in North Vietnam.P6DB and CT vari-eties, which present the smallest and largest effectiveness of nitrogen use, were chosen for a genetic testing in the next step.The results on nitrogen use efficiency are considered useful for further genetic analyses of sustainable agriculture.