UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — For small-scale farmers up against floods, droughts and other dramatic climate events, diversifying income sources can mean financial safety — a lifeline as crop-growing conditions destabilize. But in Nepal, where natural hazards rank among the most severe in the world, how farmers perceive climate-related risks often leads them to double down on agriculture instead of exploring other livelihoods, according to a study led by a Penn State researcher.
These households may see greater risks of poverty, the research group reported in the journal Population and Environment. The findings underscore the urgency for both government and nongovernment organizations to provide crop growers globally with practical information about the climate, adaptation and alternative sources of income, the research team said.
“In a lot of places in the world, small-scale farmers are the backbone of the local food supply,” said lead author Nicolas Choquette-Levy, an assistant professor of geosciences and a faculty associate in the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute at Penn State. “Many of these farmers do it out of love. Many believe they don’t have other options for making a living, so it’s important to provide farmers with the resources to explore other options when climate makes farming less viable.”
Understanding perspective from the field is especially key for public policy, said Dirgha Jibi Ghimire, a research professor with the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan and a study co-author.
“Insights into how smallholder farmers perceive climate-related disaster risk — and adapt their livelihoods — provide essential guidance for policymakers and development partners,” said Ghimire, who is executive director at the Institute for Social and Environmental Research – Nepal (ISER-N) in Chitwan, Nepal. “This knowledge can inform effective interventions that mitigate disaster impacts in low-income agricultural regions worldwide.”
Choquette-Levy began the study as a doctoral student at Princeton University, developing a survey of about 500 farming households in Nepal’s Chitwan Valley. Growers in the subsistence-agriculture-dependent region are among an estimated 500 million small-scale farmers worldwide, many expected to face climate-related hazards over the coming decades, according to the study.
“Whether and how small-scale agricultural communities adapt to increasing climate extremes will influence food security, natural preservation, urban migration and overall development patterns,” said Michael Oppenheimer, director of the Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment at Princeton University and a study co-author. “While governments have tried to make farms more resilient through education and financial investments, current efforts are insufficient to promote the widespread adaptation to a more hazardous climate.”
Agriculture accounted for 64% of Nepal’s employment and about 21% of its gross domestic product as of 2021, the researchers said.
In interviews between May and July 2022, Nepali farmers tied changing climate conditions to greater risks for their agricultural yields. The Chitwan Valley has logged roughly twice the global average temperature increase, and a drop-off in total precipitation, since 1970, according to the study. Major crops in the region include rice, maize and wheat.
At the same time, farmers believed climate-related risks in non-farming work — such as extreme heat confronting day laborers and eco-tourism workers — were even more dire, the researchers found. When farming families detect high climate risks, they may “further retrench into farming-based activities” amid climate extremes, the researchers said in the paper.
The group cited several likely factors for the pattern, including financial constraints and a fear of lost harvests.
“People who had experienced droughts or floods ended up refocusing on farming for their income sources,” Choquette-Levy said. “Even as crop yields declined, we saw retrenchment in established farming activities. And there was very low trust in government to help farmers manage these risks.”
He returned to Nepal in summer 2025 to explore prospects for follow-up studies and to meet with policymakers about the research, reviewing results as authorities budget for public investments. In the paper, Choquette-Levy and his co-authors offered specific policy suggestions, including expanded access to climate information and financial resources for low-income farmers. Specific measures could involve subsidized crop insurance and migration assistance, they wrote.
Policymakers also ought to consider promoting “less risky opportunities” for income diversification, along with ways to spread crop-yield risks over multiple harvests, the researchers said. Meanwhile, Choquette-Levy is exploring how to apply findings from developing countries closer to home in Pennsylvania, where family farmers are navigating their own shifting conditions. Nepali farmers “are already ahead of us in approaching climate change in some ways,” he said.
“Growers in Nepal have no choice,” Choquette-Levy explained. “We cultivate some of the same crops in both parts of the world – including corn, apples and vegetables. It would be instructive to see how we can combine Nepali climate knowledge with the farming resources and entrepreneurship in Pennsylvania.”
Other contributors to the paper include Rajendra Ghimire and Dil C.K., research officer and assistant research officer, respectively, at ISER-N.
The research also was supported by the Princeton High Meadows Environmental Institute Walbridge Fund, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, the Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment Nicholas Fund, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Journal
Population and Environment