Abstract

Livelihoods depend on access to natural, human, physical, financial, social, and cultural capital; the social relations people draw on to combine, transform, and expand their assets; and the ways people deploy and enhance their capabilities to act and make lives meaningful. The objective of this study is to analyze the impact of climate variability on rural livelihoods; to begin to understand the dynamism of the livelihood patterns concerning new challenges and threats; to analyze the value added to resource utilization at various stages from their primary harvesting through local processing and trading, to their final point of sale or consumption; and provide a distributional analysis to indicate how these values accrue to different social and economic groups living within the area. This research will lead to a new understanding of climate variability on natural resource-dependent livelihoods. It goes beyond traditional approaches to exploring the impact of climate variability by providing a more holistic picture.