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The purpose of this paper is to understand local perceptions on climate change and its impacts on biodiversity, rangeland, agriculture and human health.

A household survey with 300 interviewees and focus group discussions with key stakeholders were conducted and validated at two steps, using the climate data from the nearest weather stations and reviewing literatures, to correlate the local perceptions on climate change and its impacts.

Majority of the respondents reported an increase in temperature and change in the precipitation pattern with increased hazardous incidences such as floods, avalanches and landslides. Climate change directly impacted plant distribution, species composition, disease and pest infestation, forage availability, agricultural productivity and human health risks related to infectious vector-borne diseases.

Because of the remoteness and difficult terrain, there are insufficient local weather stations in the mountains providing inadequate scientific data, thus requiring extrapolation from nearest stations for long-term climate data monitoring.

The research findings recommend taking immediate actions to develop local climate change adaptation strategies through a participatory approach that would enable local communities to strengthen their adaptive capacity and resilience.

Local knowledge-based perceptions on climate change and its impacts on social, ecological and economic sectors could help scientists, practitioners and policymakers to understand the ground reality and respond accordingly through effective planning and implementing adaptive measures including policy formulation.

This research focuses on combining local knowledge-based perceptions and climate science to elaborate the impacts of climate change in a localised context in Rakaposhi Valley in Karakoram Mountains of Pakistan.

Developed countries agreed at COP15 to pay US$100bn annually for adaptation and mitigation in developing countries. This paper aims to evaluate how prepared are donors and recipients to spend this money well by analyzing institutional and organizational capabilities for climate change adaptation in least developed country (LDC) administrations using the case of Nepal, a country which can be considered to be an archetypal LDC.

The authors conducted over 100 in-depth structured qualitative interviews with government officials from across the organizational chain in the ministries concerned with climate change, ranging from the lowest-ranked employee to just under the ministerial ranks. This was supplemented with detailed surveys of three representative communities from different ecological zones in Nepal. Data were analyzed using Ostrom’s IAD framework.

Local administrations are more motivated and capable than are given credit for by donors but nevertheless face critical barriers in being able to function autonomously and confront climate change challenges. These barriers create three interrelated challenges: An organizational challenge to create intrinsic incentives which empower and grant autonomy to front line agents, an institutional challenge to go beyond accountability-focused process validation and a policy-choice challenge which avoids the temptation to write aspirational policies without clear and feasible strategies to obtain the resources necessary for their implementation.

The findings point to ways climate assistance can be restructured for more reach and effectiveness.

This paper fills a gap in the literature because community structures and institutions have been extensively analyzed in the context of adaptation, but despite being criticized, administrative structures have rarely been directly studied.