ABSTRACT
Numerous Himalayan communities are experiencing the effects of climate change, which is upsetting the region’s socio-ecological systems. This chapter explores the vulnerability of agricultural, forest, and water resources for three different categories of settlements (rural, semi-town, and town) in the Ziro circle of Arunachal Pradesh. Indicators of different dimensions (exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity) were identified, and accordingly a questionnaire was designed. Then, information on the indicators was gathered by a questionnaire-based survey of 105 randomly chosen households in three different settlement groups. The data collected from the questionnaire survey were normalized and then weightage was assigned to each indicator based on the entropy method. The results indicated that there is not much variation in the vulnerability index of the settlements. However, the rural settlements were found to be most vulnerable (VI = 0.967), semi-town was moderately vulnerable (VI = 0.860), and the town areas were least vulnerable (VI = 0.835). The analysis suggests that the rural communities should be given more importance with climate adaptive practices.
