Investigating the Vulnerability of Rural Households’ Livelihood to Climate Change in Kermanshah Province

Climate change over the last century has led to significant changes in human life, challenging human livelihood by increasing production costs, risk and uncertainty. Among different communities, rural communities are highly sensitive to climate change due to their dependence on agriculture and consequently climate. This research is a survey research that was conducted to investigate the vulnerability of rural households to climate change. For this purpose, a sample of 212 households was selected from about 134,000 rural households in Kermanshah province. The data collection tool was a questionnaire. To determine the degree of vulnerability, the household livelihood vulnerability index to climate change (LVI) was used. The results show that in all counties, rural households’ livelihood is highly sensitive to climate change. The highest sensitivity to climate change was observed in Javanrood (0.448), and the lowest was observed in Kangavar (0.4). Among the main components of the LVI index, the Livelihood strategy with a value of 0.565 has the highest sensitivity to climate change, and social networks and socio-demographic index with a value of 0.557 and 0.465, respectively, are in the next ranks. According to the results, the best ways to reduce livelihood sensitivity are to diversify income sources and reduce household dependence on agriculture through the development of non-agricultural job opportunities, expand support services such as insurance by providing various incentives including tax exemptions to insurers and increase household capacity to meet their basic needs by promoting the savings culture and providing support packages to increase their resilience to climate changes.