Vulnerability and adaption to climate change of ethnic minority women in thanh van commune cho moi district bac kan province

THAI NGUYEN UNIVERSITY UNIVERSITY OF AGRICULTURE AND FORESTRY TRAN LE THU THAO VULNERABILITY AND ADAPTATION TO CLIMATE CHANGE OF ETHNIC MINORITY WOMEN IN THANH VAN COMMUNE, CHO MOI DISTRICT, BAC KAN PROVINCE BACHELOR THESIS Study Mode : Full-time Major : Environmental Science and Management Faculty : International Programs Office Batch : 2013 – 2017 Thai Nguyen, September 2017 i DOCUMENTATION PAGE WITH ABSTRACT Thai Nguyen University of Agriculture and Forestry Degree program Bachelor of Environmental Science and Management Student name Tran Le Thu Thao Student ID DTN1353110242 Thesis title Vulnerability and adaption to climate change of ethnic minority women in Thanh Van commune, Cho Moi district, Bac Kan province Supervisor Dr Ho Ngoc Son Abstract: Moving towards to 21st century, a controversial problem over the world is vulnerability and adaptation of women to climate change Indeed, those are living in poverty, especially ethnic groups will be more vulnerable because they have less access to health service, clean environment, useful assets, good education and many other patterns The goal of this study is to evaluate the vulnerability, adaptation of ethnic minority women and their resilience as well as suggest certain ways of addressing women’s difficulties in the context of climate change By using household survey, interview, group discussion methods, the thesis was carried out in Thanh Van commune, Cho Moi district, Bac Kan province where is one of the northern mountainous area heavily impacted by climate change As a result, ethnic minority women in Thanh Van are very vulnerable to climate and non-climate stresses because of limited access to services Although they have many difficulties in adaptation process, they adopted various adaptation strategies such as applying indigenous ii knowledge in agriculture, using local cop species that are drought-tolerant…to adapt to climate risks Hence, increasing adaptive capacity and reducing vulnerability of ethnic minority women are key factors to build their resilience to climate change Key words Climate change, vulnerability, adaptive capacity, resilience, ethnic minority women Number of pages 57 Date of submission 20/09/2017 Supervisor’s signature iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENT During the research process and completion of the thesis, I received a lot of help from my teachers, my university, my friends and my family First and foremost, I would like to send my deep thanks to Dr Ho Ngoc Son who provided comments and suggestions for the thesis to be completed and gave direct guidance during the research process and completion Moreover, I would like to say thank with staffs of Agriculture & Forestry Research and Development Center for Mountainous Region (ADC) for providing me with useful materials and helping me during the time I stayed in Thanh Van commune I also thank the Tay women, local officials in Thanh Van commune who spent their time to share their experiences during the survey, interview, and activities of mine in the commune Without their enthusiasm and effort, I could not finish my thesis Last but not least, my sincere thanks also go to my family and all my classmates K45 – Advanced Education Program for their supporting, helping and loves throughout my study iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENT iv LIST OF FIGURES vii LIST OF TABLES viii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ix PART I INTRODUCTION 1 Research rationale Research’s objective Research questions Limitations PART II LITERATURE REVIEW Climate change in the world Climate change in Vietnam Climate change in Bac Kan 3.1 Impacts of climate change in Bac Kan 3.2 Unequal impacts between women and men 3.3 Responses of women 11 Some features about Thanh Van commune 12 Concepts of vulnerability, resilience and adaptation 13 5.1 Vulnerability 13 5.2 Adaptive capacity 14 5.3 Resilience 15 Linkages of vulnerability, resilience and adaptive capacity 15 PART III METHODS 17 Case study approach 17 Data collection methods 17 2.1 Household survey 17 2.2 Interview 18 2.3 Focus group discussion 19 2.4 Participation method 20 2.5 Reviewing literature 20 Data analysis methods 20 PART IV RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 21 Vulnerability of ethinic minority women in Thanh Van 21 v 1.1 Causes of vulnerability of ethinic minority women 21 1.2 Reasons of vulnerability of ethinic minority women 25 1.3 How ethnic minorty women are vulnerable to climate change 30 Adaptation strategies 33 2.1 Challenges of ethinic minority women in the context of climate change 33 2.2 Adaptation strategies of ethinic minority women 37 Building resilience to climate change 41 3.1 Increasing adaptive capacity 41 3.2 Reducing vulnerability 41 PART V CONCLUSION 43 REFERENCES 45 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 3.1 A household survey with Tay women 18 Figure 3.2 Group discussion with hazard map making 19 Figure 3.3 Group discussion with historical timeline making 20 Figure 4.1 Average temperature of 50 years in Bac Kan (1960-2010) 21 Figure 4.2 Average rainfall of 50 years in Bac Kan (1956-2006) 22 Figure 4.3 Hazard map of Thanh Van commune 31 Figure 4.4 Historical timeline in Na Ray village, Thanh Van commune 31 vii LIST OF TABLES Table 4.1 Tay women's assessment about local weather changes in 10 recent years in Thanh Van commune 23 Table 4.2 Tay women’s assessment about frequency of disasters in 10 recent years in Thanh Van commune 24 Table 4.3 Tay women’s assessment about intensity of disasters in 10 recent years in Thanh Van commune 24 Table 4.4 List of diseases in plants and livestock in Thanh Van 26 Table 4.5 Diseases on Tay women suffering from disasters, erractic weather 29 Table 4.6 Historical timeline table in Na Ray 32 Table 4.7 Adaptation of Tay women in Thanh Van 37 Table 4.8 Tay women use indigenous knowledge and modern method in agriculture 40 viii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ADC Agriculture & Forestry Research and Development Center for Mountainous Region CARE Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere FAO The Food and Agriculture Organization INSPONRE Institute of Strategy and Policy on Natural Resources and Environment IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change NOAA National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration PRRS Porcine Reproductive & Respiratory Syndrome VSLA Village Savings and Loans Associations WBGU German Advisory Council on Global Change ix PART I INTRODUCTION Research rationale In the 21st century, climate change is one of the greatest challenges that have caused tremendous changes through extreme climatic events such as rising temperatures, strong storms, heavy rain, floods, droughts and rising sea levels for mankind It is noteworthy that the impacts of climate change are significant and increasing, causing a considerable impact on the national economy, even more strongly on the livelihoods of the poorest groups living in countryside Vietnam is one of the countries most severely affected by the increasing manifestation of these phenomena In addition to policies promulgated by the Government of Vietnam to adapt to climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the international community has been actively supporting the Government of Viet Nam in climate change response activities, towards sustainable development in localities, especially underdeveloped and poor areas Generally, climate change becomes more serious and unpredicted in the Northern mountainous areas In fact, climate change will cause serious consequences to these areas because the Northern mountainous areas have many factors creating vulnerability status easily such as high poverty rate, limited mitigation approaches, degraded ecology environment, complex terrain, many ethnic minorities, main works depending mainly on agriculture and forestry and the like, which are influenced greatly from natural disasters and weather However, it is inherently more vulnerable in some groups of people such as ethnic minorities, the very old or very young, the sick who have limited access to information, resources and services Especially, Adaptation strategies 2.1 Challenges of ethinic minority women in the context of climate change This section focuses on analyzing Tay women’s challenges through specific factors Firstly, about human factor, at household level: survey results show that each household has from to members, of which from to are main workers (one of them is women) and the rest is dependent on main workers This reflects the heavy burden of dependent members Each labor is responsible for at least one other member of the family As a result of natural disasters, the income from major agricultural and livestock production is declining and unstable as well as the pressure from underemployment will cause many difficulties for the livelihoods of farmers Especially women who spend most of their time in the fields In terms of education, in the results, over 70% of women have secondary education, 16.7% of women have tertiary education and 3.3% has primary education Meanwhile, university degree is achieved by one women only The low level of education and pressure on the number of dependents in the family will cause difficulties for women when they want to create sustainable livelihoods and coping strategies Secondly, in terms of asset, poor households have fewer means of living than middle-income households All households have motorbikes Of which, most poor households have a motorbike for more than years The average household has to motorcycles and many motorcycles are newly purchased More than 50% of households not use bicycles In addition, most of households has TV and refrigerator However, household does not have television and household has 33 televisions households not have refrigerators and household has refrigerators Especially, only one household has a truck and one household has a washing machine In general, poor households are vulnerable due to lack of facilities, especially in times of natural disasters For example, they not have good transportation facilities to evacuate, so old furniture is prone to damage when natural disasters occur… When it comes to income, the main income of local people is mainly from agricultural production, including cultivation, livestock, forestry and aquaculture In addition, some households earn income from small businesses, part-time jobs which more than 30% of households In 2016, the lowest household income is 12,000,000 vnd / year and the highest is 194,000,000 vnd / year On average, households have income about 3-4,000,000 / month In these, households received a small grant (1-2 million / year) from the government It costs a lot of money such as children going to school, medical treatment, daily meals, electricity bills, wedding parties, funeral or some households repairs home, buy new furniture, sudden sickness so income of 70% households are often not enough When a disaster occurs, the work of the households will be unstable, leading to low income, especially those have no saving money Moreover, the cultivated land area is an important factor in the household's livelihoods and so much depends on the livelihood vulnerability of the households As a household has much productive land, the income will be accumulated to use for adapting to disasters Therefore, the vulnerability is reduced According to survey data, all households have forest land and farm land, some households have land for perennial crops and aquaculture land The largest cultivated land area is 10.74 hectares and the smallest is 1.08 hectares On average, each household has about 4-5 hectares 34 of total cultivated land Cultivated land is mainly used for growing bananas, rice and vegetables and fish However, from 2015, many households have shifted to acacia and manglietia glauca plantation, because the banana has many pests and diseases Many households want to expand their farming but they not have land anymore Furthermore, social organization plays a crucial role in adapting to climate change There are 60% of the surveyed Tay women are members of the women union, 26.7% are women union and farmer group members, and 6.7% are women who not participate in any group In Thanh Van commune, interested groups are becoming very popular and helping women a lot The proportion of Tay women who are involved in groups such as banana cultivation, saving group or joining both is 76.7% This is an important factor in the dissemination, propaganda as well as mobilization of women to participate in the work of warning and prevention of harm caused by natural disasters in the locality For example, through the meetings of the women union or the savings group, the ADC’s staff held training courses on planting and restoring of banana gardens for village saving and loan associate members which there are many women members, and local staffs to share experiences on banana varieties selection techniques, growing techniques and pest control Since 2011, the ADC has interested in Thanh Hoa Commune, and especially there are projects targeting ethnic minorities responding to climate change such as “Ginger, medicinal plant model intercrop with bananas to adapt to drought on sloping land (2011-2014)”, “Ethinic minority adapt to climate change in Bac Kan province”, “Climate Justice Feminist Participatory Action Research” (2017) and many other projects From 2014, the Department of Natural Resources and Environment in Bac Kan Province took part in the prevention of the 35 impacts of climate change but women have been not received much attention Every year, commune authorities develop plans for forest protection, scientific and technical methods in production to respond to climate change, but when applying these plans, commune authorities have not really paid much attention (comments of the Head of women union in Thanh Van) Unfortunately, supports from local authorities are not enough to help households overcome difficulties in the context of natural disasters because of lacking of fund A Tay women in Na Ray said that one household in Quan Lang village suffered a extreme drought and 0.13 hectares of rice fields lost Local authorities supported 60,000vnd to buy new seeds and overcome the consequences but this amount of money only enough for electricity money to pump water into the field One fact that researcher heard from a lady was that ADC’s staff directly guided how to make vermicompost to kill fungi in bananas, improve yield and provided vermicompost for her to carry out but she took this for orange trees Of course, neither orange nor banana are not as effective as expected These misconceptions are due to unequal perceptions of women Adaptive capacity through the above factors of women is low The livelihood activities of women are vulnerable to natural disasters because the human factor is insufficient in both quantity and level, limited assets, low financial returns due to unstable incomes, limited cultivated land area and lack of irrigation water, although social factor is diverse, this is not sufficient to overcome the consequences of natural disasters 36 2.2 Adaptation strategies of ethinic minority women Most importantly, by using their own resourses, local knowledge and social networks, women adopted diverse adaptation strategies to cope with impacts of climate change (Table 4.7) 37 Table 4.7 Adaptation activities of Tay women Disaster Adaptation activities Drought Keeping rainwater Keeping, protecting water sources Changing season of crops Changing drought tolerance crops Changing farming techniques: amount of fertilizer, insecticide Hot/ cold snaps Family health management Adjusting the area and time grazing Planting shaded trees Change to plant sun-hot trees Health and disease management in livestock and crops Change farming techniques: amount of fertilizer, insecticide Storm Update early warning information Building houses can suffer strong winds Planting and restoring forests Plant windbreak trees Landslide Avoid building houses near areas that have landslide Observing the phenomenon of landslide signaling Listen to forecast information Evacuate to a safe place if there is a landslide Plant more trees, protect the forest 38 In addition, to adapt to climate change, women have learned to apply indigenous knowledge to the use of seeds, experience in weather forecasting and production For instanse, Tay ethnic grows maize on contours (chapter II, section 3.3) Also, they have combined indigenous knowledge with technical methods to have high production Indigenous cultivars are rice, maize, sweet potato, cassava, bananas and indigenous animals such as pigs, buffaloes, ducks and goats that are suitable for the weather conditions in the commune In the future, Tay women have plans about growing some other plants which can suffer hot, drought, less pest, diseases such as chinaberry, eucalyptus, acacia, apricot, pineapple, plum, cinnamon… They depend on folk verses and proverb or changes of the environment to predict the weather (50% surveyed Tay women) and they think it is quite exact For example, Tay people find soil fungi (Bjooc Din) growing in forests that means raining (part II, section 3.3) or dragonflies fly low -rain, fly high - sunny, medium – shady (chuon chuon bay thap thi mua, bay cao thi nang, bay vua thi ram)… To develop household income effectively, women regularly watch weather forecast on television and listen to local announcements (100%) In particular, women have extensive experiences in manufacturing and incorporate with modern scientific methods to help plants, animals develop well in extreme weather conditions get higher productivity (26.7% women) (Table 4.8) 39 Table 4.8 Tay women use indigenous knowledge and modern method in agriculture Plant/ animal Combination of traditional method and modern method Rice Sowing: using plastic bag during cold snaps, using machine Normally, crops in a year Due to cold weather, planting more crop of potatoes, beans, to make good soil, increase income Citrus Using grafting technique – develop in years (instead of germinating seeds that develop in years) Apricot using ax to carve the trunk combining spraying insecticides to kill insects Chicken Using garlic and medicine to treat diseases Pig, buffalo Mix traditional medicine with food to feed them and inject medicine to treat diseases Duck Feeding by banana and bran (easy to find this kind of food) 40 Building resilience to climate change 3.1 Increasing adaptive capacity It is clear that the system with high adaptive capacity are resilient and able to reconfigure themselves to deal with climate change (part II, section 6) To build resilience for Tay women, there are main building factors: self – capacity and local capacity or government capacity Self – capacity includes learning from experiences, expanding knowledge, supporting their likelihoods and taking part in social organizations To cope with natural disasters, by their own experiences, Tay women have used a wide local varieties, oriented their livelihoods for the future such as raising more animals, growing plants, combined indigenous knowledge with scientific methods to enhance productivity However, there are very few women having this experiences because their education are low that have mentioned above section The solution is that the women must be conscious of learning more from other experienced people as well as from television, books and newspapers, and must cast aside her inferiority complex to overcome difficulties Only the determination and resilience of women win themselves and help them lead a better life 3.2 Reducing vulnerability As discussed above, limited access to services is the reason that causes vulnerability of Tay women in Thanh Van (part IV – section 1.2) and a resilient system is less vulnerable than a non-resilient system (part II, section 6) Therefore, increasing access of women to services is a crucial approach to build resilience To strengthen women’s likelihoods, each of them has to put forward their knowledge, skills, make use of efficient production resources, improve their access to 41 employment, services, technologies and invest more asset It is very important for the women themselves and the resilience of the community Taking part in social organizations is a key factor to allow women not only learn farming methods but also enhance their voice in home and the community through meetings, training course They have joined in women union or interested groups but unluckily, in some households, husbands not want their wives to go to the meetings, activities in the commune because the husband are jealous and think that it is time consuming In this situation, the participation of local officials as well as the government is essential to help women escape injustices Therefore, the women could access to new information about locality, society and also climate change As Tay surveyed women and the head of women union said, to overcome the disaster's consequences, local staffs have been supporting the people For example, they repaired, restored, upgraded homes which were blown up roof or collapsed; supported money, labor day to stabilize people's lives; supported plant varieties such as oranges, tangerines, rice and livestock to restore production, carried out environmental sanitation and epidemic prevention in affected areas However, budget of locality is limited, attention of the government is not thorough, there are no remedial actions for women, many households, and many women are not able to resilient Hence, local capacity is an important to support women about economy and spirit after the heavy losses left by natural disasters 42 PART V CONCLUSION In conclusion, ethnic minority women in Thanh Van commune are vulnerable from more severe and erratic natural disasters As compared to 10 years ago, natural disasters such as drought, extreme hot and cold snaps were considered by the Tay women that these disasters appeared more than other phenomena and stronger intensity, causing damage, serious harm to agriculture, animal husbandry and the woman themselves The amount of water is reduced, plants and livestock are subjected to many pests and diseases, soil erosion and so on, which leads to reduced livelihood of women In addition to farm works, women have to take care of their families, so the health is reduced, they have diseases easily when the weather changes Moreover, they are under stress due to lack of nutrition, big debts, diseases They not have much access to health care services, clean environmental works, joining in social organizations due to low literacy, poverty and decisions of man in every problem Women are vulnerable to natural disasters because their adaptive capacity is not high The human factor is not sufficient in terms of quantity and qualifications, unstable incomes, lack of means of production and assets, the area of cultivated land is not expanded Although ethnic minority women have engaged in some kinds of social organizations to improve the capacity of themselves The local official has concerned but this is not enough to overcome the consequences of natural disasters Clearly, with the hardworking, contriving well of personalities, ethnic minority women have learned and applied some adaptations to climate change in livestock, farming, as well as to their families and themselves For example, they changed season of crops, farming techniques: amount of fertilizer, insecticide; planted and restored forests… 43 Ethnic minority women is important agents of change and innovators because they make up a large part of the country’s agricultural workforce However, they have greater financial and resource constraints, and lower levels of access to information and services than men Because of these gender inequalities, women face unique challenges when it comes to adapting to climate change Hence, local and government officials need to take part in creating the empowerment of women by allowing women to achieve equal control over the factors of production and to participate equally in the development process, integrating gender into agriculture-related climate change activities and policy This will help the ethnic minority women have new economic opportunities for women farmers, access information and technologies, cultivate entrepreneurial and marketing skills,… and be better prepared for further climate changes in the future It is true that village savings and loans associations (VSLA) will give women more economic power, more powerful in respect of their voices being heard, and by seeing their incomes improve, understand better how to tailor their businesses to deal with climate shocks However, in Thanh Van commune, the number of women who belong to VSLA – a microfinance model - is not high Therefore, the local officials, the climate-related organizations and also the government have to actively encourage and create the greatest opportunity for women to participate At the same 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RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 21 Vulnerability of ethinic minority women in Thanh Van 21 v 1.1 Causes of vulnerability of ethinic minority women 21 1.2 Reasons of vulnerability of ethinic... Vulnerability and adaption to climate change of ethnic minority women in Thanh Van commune, Cho Moi district, Bac Kan province Supervisor Dr Ho Ngoc Son Abstract: Moving towards to 21st century, a controversial