Climate Change Impacts on Agriculture and Vulnerability as Expected Poverty of Kampong Speu Province, Cambodia

Abstract

As a developing country that is heavily dependent on agriculture, Cambodia has been severely affected by natural hazards. Since the 1990s, there has been an increase in the frequency and severity of flooding and drought induced or exacerbated by climate change. Literature has demonstrated that Cambodia is very vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate change. Vulnerability, as posited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is a function of the character, magnitude and rate of climate change and variation to which a system is exposed, its sensitivity and its adaptive capacity. This paper measures the vulnerability as expected poverty (VEP), introduced by Shubham Chaudhuri, in a province in Cambodia, Kampong Speu (KPS), using household survey data. The results show that among all of the exposures to natural hazards in Cambodia, drought poses the highest risk for rain-fed agriculture dependent households. The VEP shows that more than 60% of households in the KPS province are vulnerable to climate change with an income threshold of US $1 per day. Some policy recommendations resulting from this study include building irrigation systems to mitigate the impacts of droughts, ensuring secondary income generation opportunities for poor households so that households do not depend exclusively on agriculture, and increasing the education level of villagers.