ORIGINAL ARTICLE Climate change and poverty: building resilience of rural mountain communities in South Sikkim, Eastern Himalaya, India Anamika Barua • Suparana Katyaini • Bhupen Mili • Pernille Gooch Received: 9 November 2012 / Accepted: 29 April 2013 Ó Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013 Abstract The rural mountain communities have long faced challenges from a range of social, economic, political and environmental factors and the threat from these factors has only intensified due to the current climate change. This study was conducted in South Sikkim, a mountain region located in the Indian Eastern Himalaya, to get a deeper insight of the multitude of barriers and stresses that a poor rural mountain community experiences. The purpose of the study was to get community’s perception on the kind of interventions that they consider important to lift them out of poverty and enhance their resilience to manage climate risk. The analysis is based on focus group discussions and household survey, using a multidimensional poverty assessment tool. The study highlights that the vulnerability of the study region to climate change is not concentrated to physical or geographical factors alone, but mostly to the socio-economic factors like lack of access to education, health care, limited livelihood opportunities, limited resources, etc. People consider that these non-climatic factors act as barriers for them to overcome poverty, con- tribute to their weak resilience, and make it extremely difficult for them to manage the risk posed by climate change. The study therefore suggests that it is of utmost importance that the interventions are planned in ways that address the multidimensional poverty in the region which in turn will enhance community’s inherent capacity to adapt to current as well as future climate risk. Keywords Climate change  Multidimensional poverty assessment tool  Poverty  Resilience Introduction Mountains are among the regions most sensitive to climate change (Neu 2009). Mountains are hotspots of threatened, rare and endemic species, as well as of the poorest people, highly dependent on biological resources for their survival (Kollmair et al. 2005). Traditional mountain societies are characterized by the closed interconnection that they maintain with nature and its natural resources (Rama- krishnan 2007). They have been conserving the biodiver- sity of the region over countless generations through their strong informal rural institutions and community knowl- edge systems (Singh et al. 2009). The traditional institu- tions as well as the indigenous knowledge in the past have played a significant role by making the mountain com- munities less vulnerable to uncertainties arising from glo- bal change. However, in recent times, due to various anthropogenic factors along with cultural changes among the mountain communities, these traditional social institu- tions as well as the indigenous community knowledge systems have started to erode mainly among the younger generation (Singh et al. 2009). This has also led to rapid degradation of natural resources (Ramakrishnan 2007) which poses serious threats to the lives and the livelihoods of the natural resource-dependent mountain communities. While traditional practices such as subsistence agricul- ture and local knowledge systems provide the much needed coping capacity to offset climate risks, but limited liveli- hood options, lack of mainstream information, poor access to modern services and inequitable access to productive resources reduce their capacity to cope with future climate A. Barua (&)  S. Katyaini  B. Mili Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, India e-mail: anamika.barua@gmail.com P. Gooch Human Ecology Division, Lund University, Lund, Sweden 123 Reg Environ Change DOI 10.1007/s10113-013-0471-1