Paper short abstract:

Over the last decade, the Himalayan agro-pastoral community of Gaddi (Bharmour, Himachal Pradesh, North India) has experienced and responded to high changes in weather conditions. This work explores how the community perceives its adaptations to reported changes in weather.

Paper long abstract:

The Gaddi community (Himachal Pradesh, India) reports high changes in weather conditions and these are evaluated in comparison with what is considered a normal weather pattern, generally referring to the pattern observed two decades ago. The reported alterations have visible impacts on the community's traditional livelihood activities. For example, increasing temperatures allow families to cultivate new crops; delayed snowfalls lead to delays in sowing and in the preparation of winter activities such as wood collection; the decreasing snow quantity has diminished families' winter migration; and changes in rain patterns are reducing the quality of vegetation, what results in an increment in pesticide utilization and more frequent shifts between grazing lands.

This work investigates the Gaddi's perceptions of these recent adaptations. Based on a five-months ethnographic fieldwork, preliminary results show that families do not perceive their transforming traditional livelihood practices as responding to changing weather. First, the community does not identify changing weather conditions as an isolated phenomenon but consider them in the context of the overall socioecological system: over the last decades, socio-economic and political conditions have been considerably changing, what has strongly affected household traditional practices and season patterns. In this context, adapting strategies to recent alterations in weather conditions are reported as being an integral part of adaptations to overall systemic changes.

Second, adjustments of traditional livelihood activities timings to recent seasonal shifts are generally viewed by Gaddi as a continuum in their practices. In this way, they are simply following the weather, as they always did.