IJERD – International Journal of Environmental and Rural Development (2016) 7-1

Research article
erd

Mechanism toward Resilience Building in the Face of Climate
Change: A Review for Cambodian Rural Communities
NIMUL CHUN*
Faculty of Agriculture, Svay Rieng University, Svay Rieng Province, Cambodia
Email: chun_nimul@hotmail.com
Received 22 November 2015

Accepted 11 April 2016(*Corresponding Author)

Abstract The article discusses the current climatic situations in Cambodia and existingmechanisms of the country to address climate change (CC) and the level of rural communities
being able to adapt to CC. Reviews of various CC related documents indicate that structuresand mechanisms at national level to address CC are adequate but limited at community level.
The existence of the structures is beneficial to local people unless the adaptive capacity isenhanced with sufficient technological alternatives, implications and applications with wider
sector involvement and a decentralization system. An emerging barrier to resilient building ofcommunity and the country is limited of fiscal decentralization as the current financial sources
for CC resilient building are solely dependent on external funds for decades while these sources
are declining. Additionally, informational, technical and managerial inputs are still strongly
required for local communities in order to ensure that the least consequences of any occurredclimatic hazards can be obtained. Involving private sector would, therefore, be a good option
for local communities in the future provided that private investors have skills to effectively
manage rural infrastructures, for example irrigation systems.
Keywords rural development, climate change mechanism, environment

INTRODUCTION
In the year 2012, Cambodia was ranked as the 26th most vulnerable country to CC in the world (Kreft
and Eckstein, 2013). In 2011, Cambodia was ranked as the 10th most affected country in the world withmore than 250 people being killed as a result of flooding (Kreft and Eckstein, 2012) and 270,000
hectares of cultivated land being destroyed, affecting more than 50,000 households (Wise, 2012).
Despite being a fairly-small country (181,035 km2), the temperature in the year 2030 is estimated tovary greatly per its geographical location with the average increase of about 20C (MoE et al., 2011).
The variation in these conditions makes the country's level of vulnerability differ as well. Despite being
in a high level of vulnerability, the country has paid attention to the problems of CC only in the last
decade. Since early 2010, CC concepts have been integrated into several new emerging national
programmes and onto the development agendas of more state institutions and civil societies
development organizations, including National Strategic Development Plan (NSDP), Rectangular
Strategy Phase II (Pheakdey, 2013), and Sub-National Reform Strategy. These concepts are eventuallyin the Cambodia Climate Change Strategic Plan 2014-2023 (RGC, 2013). These have been added to
the CC resilience building agenda for the country at both national and sub-national levels. Despite CCconcepts being arguably captured and integrated into various policy documents at national level withsome tangible accomplishments to be proud of; exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity of local
communities to CC have posted continuous questions and doubts.

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OBJECTIVE
The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent to which local communities are ready to face up to
the upcoming repercussions of the ever-changing climate. The objectives of the article are to provide
an overall understanding on climate change issues and impacts on rural livelihood, to explore andassess the existing mechanisms to cope and build rural community capacity and resilience in the faceof CC in rural communities in Cambodia.
METHODOLOGY
Literature reviews in combination with actual experience working in the field of climate change is amethod being used for preparing this study. Various documents including research articles, government
policy documents and project implementation reports of related institutions on climate resilience andmechanism had been consulted. The information relevant to climate change policy, studies, anddecentralization and deconcentration (D&D) policies and mechanisms of three main stakeholders;Cambodian governments, development partners and civil society organisations; was gathered andsynthesized so that insights of climatic issues and responses can be revealed and appropriate measures
can be suggested. Prior to the analysis, the socio-economic context, particularly poverty and responsesof rural people was studied to determine the relationships of climate change impacts on rural livelihoodand effectiveness of the existing measures can be identified. From these associations, the possible
approaches would be able to propose.
RESULTS
Cambodia Rural Livelihood
Agriculture and natural resources: In Cambodia, there is still a majority of poor inhabitants residing
in rural area with agriculture as their main occupation, employing more than half of the country’s
labour force. Rice production, covering more than 80% of total cultivated land areas, is the mostdominant crop. Nearly 80% rural families are rice farmers. Rice production contributed 10% ofcountry’s total export commodities in 2007 (Yu and Diao, 2011). Fishing is also an important part ofrural people’s daily life. Nearly 80% of Cambodian animal protein consumption is from fish (Hortle,
2007). Animal husbandry is one of the key drivers in rural livelihood, contributing to 7.6% of GDP.
Cattle and buffaloes are the biggest share of the sector with nearly 80% of the total animals in the
country (FAO, 2004) and number of animals in 2009 was 29 million being known as not only thesource of draught forces but also savings (Bansok et al., 2011). Forestry is a subsistence source of
livelihood for nearly 80% of the population in rural areas. However, the pressure being put on these
forest areas by economic land concessions is gradually putting the livelihood of the rural people under
threat (Bansok et al., 2011).
Poverty and migration: Poverty and inequality are still rampant in Cambodia. Poverty rate wasreported to be around 25.8% in 2010 of which 91.1% of them were residing in rural areas (MoP, 2010)
and the figure was 20.5% in the year 2011 (The World Bank, 2013). Despite the small proportion of
the poor, the group that is sensitive to poverty is proportionally large, i.e. a small change in
consumption should bring 41% of the rural people back into the group under the poverty line (TheWorld Bank, 2013). The vulnerability of the rural people is very high as low income is unable to copewith natural shocks and migration to other parts of Cambodia and abroad is a kind of an autonomously
adaptive mechanism to disaster events (Bylander, 2013). Floods caused migration as in the floods ofyear 2011, which caused around 9% of rural poor migrated to obtain jobs (RGC, 2012). This would beⒸ ISERD

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greater in the near future because of the upsurge of rural labour forces and less available land for
agricultural production due to economic land concessions (Scheidel, 2013).
Impacts of Climate Change
Direct impacts of natural phenomena such as storms, floods and droughts are significant. Typhoon
Ketsana in 2009 resulted in large damages and losses. For rural road alone, the costs were estimated to
be about USD 28 million (RGC, 2010). The adverse effect of the 2011 flood on rural infrastructure wasone of the worst impacts in Cambodia's recent history resulting in immense damages on rural
infrastructures (Wise, 2012). In addition to floods, droughts have been found to have the most frequenteffect on rural people despite being paid less attention from related state authorities (UNDP, 2010). CC
has a strong association with rural livelihood. Any changes can make profound impacts on foodsecurity and way of life in the rural areas. For example, changes in rainfalls and temperatures have asignificant impact on productivity of rainfed rice (Mainuddin et al., 2012), resulting in decreasing rice
yield (Johnston et al., 2010). The effect is even worse as agricultural production in rural areas generally
depends mainly on rainfall and only 18% of the cultivated land areas have irrigation systems (Yu andDiao, 2011). Animal husbandry is reported to be sensitive to changes in temperature (Jhonston et al.,2010). Infections and diseases are more likely to occur (Seo and Mendelsohn, 2007), especially during
the hottest period of the year (Bansok, 2011). All of these have made people think that agriculture is
not a good choice (Bylander, 2013). These factors have made rural people greatly vulnerable to theimpacts of CC as their adaptive capacity is weak (Gallopin, 2006).
Climate Change Adaptation Mechanism
National adaptation mechanism: Adaptive mechanism to CC in Cambodia is complicated withoverlapping roles of institutions. The most well-known institution dealing with disaster and risk
reduction is National Committee for Disaster Management (NCDM), albeit having limited authorities
and budgets for implementation. A number of state institutions have declared that they have themandates to tackle the issues. In late 2006, the National Climate Change Committee was establishedwith a coordinating body under Ministry of Environment and a number of state institutions as members
including the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fishery, Ministry of Water Resources, andMeteorology, Ministry of Health and Ministry of Planning as implementing agencies. Another agency
is Ministry of Interior that involves mainly with deconcentration and decentralization reform (CCCN,
2014). The Ministry of Interior is leading a nationwide reforming programme of the country and is also
involved in the process of integrating CC concepts into local authority plans and budgets. The statebudget has channelled funding to local level authorities through this programme (Kimchoeun, 2011).
Despite having a coordinating institution, the actual process in coordinating is difficult and time
consuming.
Sub-national level mechanism: There is no specific study spelling out the mechanism at sub-national
level in response to CC, except the common state administrative system; national, provincial, district,community, and village level. Each administrative area can have a chance to be supported on the topicof CC unless the area has been included in any CC programmes or projects. Apart from this common
administrative structure, the system being used to respond to climatic hazards of the National
Committee for Disaster Management and the CC capacity building of Ministry of Environment isalmost the same to the existing administrative system of the government.
Non-governmental organizations: Non-Governmental Organizations and Civil Society Organizations
are playing a major role in developing rural areas and communities. International development
organizations coordinate for financial support, implement climate change related projects and advocate
the establishment of policy documents. These organizations include UNDP, the World Bank, Asia
Development Bank, DANIDA, IFRC-RCS, SIDA, Plan Cambodia, and Oxfam (AIT, 2010). TheⒸ ISERD

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organizations provide financial, technical, and policy advocacy in the country. Local organizations
make proposals for financial support from these international development organizations to implement
projects at community level.
Community Mechanism and Resilience
Sovacool et al. (2012) have indicated four domains of CC resilience: institutional, capacity, financial,and infrastructural; that should be included in any development project implementation. These fourdomains have been so far accomplished to some extent. Insight analyses of these domains depicting thelevel to which local communities that are capable to adaptation and being resilient to CC are provided
below.
Institutional resilience: Cambodia has made its progress in sub-national reform. In the year 2001, aCommune, Sangkat Law, was established to decentralize the state authorities to local authorities.
Another move was made in 2008 as the establishment of Organic Law giving birth to thedeconcentration reform making the district and provincial levels closer to community level rather thannational level (Niazi, 2011). Apart from the administrative reform, the efforts in integrating CC
concepts at grassroot level have already been framed and legalized to some extent. These include theestablishment of livelihood based groups, such as water user groups, livelihood improvement groups,
and farmer water user groups at community level. However, these groups are not in a good position to
respond to the challenge of climatic events in a broader perspective because their capacities are at thestage of requiring further supports, including technical, managerial and financial. Moreover, thesegroups minimally contribute to their livelihoods (Conan et al., 2013; UNDP, 2013a; Silva et al., 2013).
In this regard, a number of established local organizations are unable to survive long after their support
has ended. Additionally, poor governance in almost all sectors at all management levels is observed
rampant and is hindered the country’s sustainable development (Nguyen et al., 2010).
Capacity resilience: Institutional and individual capacity of Cambodian rural communities is weak.
Cambodia is ranked as the 138th in the world Human Development Index (UNDP, 2013b). According
to MoE et al. (2011), the Human Development Index of each province varies greatly based on location.
Knowledge on CC is found to be limited among villagers who find it difficult to define andinformation regarding their problems for practical purposes. This has brought another barrier for local
community to respond to CC as they have limited and irregular sources of information about the
coming weather related events from Early Warning System or responsible institutions (CCCN, 2014).
Without proper information and institutional support, the capacity of rural communities tends to be
weak putting them at immense risk, particularly the poor and the near poor. In addition, the adaptive
capacity of the communities is limited. These require continuous technical support to strengthen thecapacity for both individual and communities.
Financial resilience: As the people of the country become aware of the concept of CC and externalfunding for providing this issue is more available, there is a shift in conventional development focus ofNGOs toward CC resilience building and adaptation. One major concern of finance is that externalsources contributed nearly 90% of the country’s development investment since 2005 (Sato et al., 2011).
The current external support of CC finance is reported to be worth about US$ 655.6 million out of
which US$ 338.8 million has been disbursed and US$ 316.8 million is for the years 2014-2020(Pheakdey, 2013). A decentralized system should have been a long-term source of budget for local
development. However, fiscal decentralization is not in place for implementation (Kimchuen, 2011).
Though, there is room for collective actions for communities - including water user groups, farmer
water user groups and livelihood improvement groups - in mobilizing local resources for specificpurposes. However, the groups are either more self-dependent or rely more on support of nongovernmental organizations that are themselves generally facing the problem of viability. These havegiven the authorities limited financial solutions toward both conventional development needs andconsequences of climatic events.
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Infrastructural resilience: The majority of Cambodian rural infrastructures are designed for normal
situations without consideration for climate hazards or natural phenomenon. As a result, theseinfrastructures can be damaged easily. According to RGC (2010), poor quality of foundations andsubgrades, prolonged wet conditions and poor standard of designs, e.g. inadequate drainage systems
are identified as factors contributing to rural roads being unable to withstand bad weather. The conceptof climate resilience infrastructure has been newly introduced into various sector infrastructuredevelopments. Climate resilient infrastructure projects are being integrated into various related
Ministries with the support of Project for Piloting the Climate Resilience (PPCR) that allocates budgetof US$86 million to improve the climate resilience of Cambodia’s core sectors. This includes water
management, agriculture, and rural infrastructure as well as institutional capacity development (CIF,
2012). There is no other sign of allowing for CC integration into the infrastructure development of thecountry.
DISCUSSION
Despite availability of provision for good CC structures and mechanisms at national level, and fordecentralization and de-concentration systems at sub-national level, there are still major concerns
regarding financial, capacity and infrastructural resilience building. Considering poor governance andmanagement at all levels, in combination with dependence on external sources of finance, it is hard toforecast a strong future for Cambodian rural communities (Hill and Menon, 2013; Nguyen et al., 2011).
This has become worse with the rural infrastructures being insensitive to environmental shocks andweak individual capacity. It will be difficult to reverse this situation because external funding is going
to decline over time. The situation could become better when there are proper financial mechanisms toprovide adequate sources of investment in each community and the introduction and implementation of
fiscal decentralization. By making this reform, communities would be able to mobilize local resources
and be able to respond immediately to the occurrence of any climatic disasters. This does notnecessarily mean that the problem of making provision for CC in the future is insurmountable.
Administrative reform in enhancing a community based taxation system, encouraging safe migration as
an additional source of funds replacing agriculture, and strengthening the ecological system as asecondary source of livelihood would mitigate the problem. The concern related to water shortage
could be solved by enhancing small scale irrigation systems. This would bring back community
capacity to systematically cope with CC nationwide. For example, a government program on microfinance credits – with low interest rates to involve more private sector participation to invest in thewater sector – would help farmers escape from the water shortage which occurs frequently in
Cambodia. Being aware of the possibility of natural disasters happening and being ready to respond todisasters should be encouraged. Farmers or local people should have adequate and accessible toinformation and knowledge on how risks can be mitigated. This needs more attention to the existenceof CC and more understanding of the problems by both national and sub-national level of CC related
institutions.
CONCLUSION
Cambodian rural communities are facing barriers in coping with CC with very limited resources
including financial, capacity and infrastructure, albeit institutional mechanism slightly strengthened
lately. Programmes based on ad hoc supports will not improve the situation since the financial andtechnical capacity of local people varies so greatly from one location to another. Construction andmaintenance of irrigation systems and climatic event information dissemination need to be done
regularly. As migration is the farmers’ coping mechanism in response to environmental shocks, itmeasures to ensure that migration is safe for them is required. Additionally, natural resourcesⒸ ISERD108

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conservation is significant because migrants utilize natural resources as part of their livelihood
activities. It would, therefore, be better for the farmers to be trained to be resilient so that all livelihood
activities - including agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, water and provision of climatic
information - can properly interact and all the farmers and villagers can be reliably informed. In theface of CC and limited financial resources, fiscal decentralization for creating local sources of funds
and encouraging private sector participation would be optimal for community people to give them
freedom in choosing solutions to tackling the issues though technical and managerial supports should
never be left out of the agenda.
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