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Frequent extreme weather events result in substantial economic losses for farming communities, posing a significant threat to the livelihood security of smallholder farmers in the Sundarbans region of India. Various agricultural enterprises in this area are continually at risk due to saline water intrusion, crop damage from heavy rainfall, and flooding. We examine the strategies farmers have adopted to sustain their livelihoods in the face of these extreme weather events. We collected primary data from a randomly selected sample of 1,200 farmers across six blocks in the Sundarbans region, focussing on farm households engaged in diverse agricultural enterprises, including field crop cultivation, livestock rearing, and fish farming. We used the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to prioritize the coping mechanisms adopted by these farming communities. The assessment of coping mechanisms was based on four criteria: ease of implementation, cost, effectiveness, and durability for long-term application. Effectiveness got the highest weights of 0.492 followed by the durability of the coping strategy weights of 0.309. Coping mechanisms pertaining to managing soil health against soil salinity, raising livestock and fish species as well as cultivating field crops were identified and prioritized according to their perceived efficacy against extreme weather events. Our results can inform the formulation of robust and sustainable development policies for agricultural and allied sectors in the Indian Sundarbans.

来源平台：HUMAN ECOLOGY