cope with climate fluctuations. It will thus be necessary to walk a fine line of balanced conservation strategies to support local livelihoods in the best possible way.

Finally, policies that facilitate the flexible reallocation of production factors, both as an _ex ante_ adaptation to long-run climatic change (barely yet observed in our sites, and thus little dealt with in this report) and as _ex post_ coping with climate anomalies (analyzed more thoroughly above), may be helpful: training and education, lowering entry barriers into small businesses, provision of small-scale credits for income diversification, etc.

Education and other investments in off-farm sectors are often routinely recommended as effective adaptive and coping options for shifting labor into activities that are not climate-sensitive. While this may well be an important pathway for climate change adaptation, some of our results – e.g. the strongly significant negative effects of weather variables on “other incomes” – may also caution against any belief in quick non-farm fixes. The physical sensitivity and productive resilience to climate change is just one factor of interest here; the human preferences of settlement may be of just as high relevance: outmigration from areas with strong climatic changes will probably occur even when natural resource production is only marginally affected, although these dynamics of human settlement also lie outside of the scope of this report.

What further research needs and opportunities can we possibly point to based on this work? In addition to further time series studies, our analysis of annual weather anomalies has been one indicator in our study that does simulate an unexpected deviation from trends, which may constitute a more interesting factor of reference for climate change effects than is any so far very limited rise in mean temperatures. In prolongation of this effort, one could look further into anomalies at a finer time scale (seasons, months, in relation to dominant cropping cycles, etc.). In addition, one could also analyze which sites over time have already experienced a systematically higher incidence and/or intensity of weather anomalies, indicating another important change factor of reference.

On aggregate, our report points to an additional justification for forest conservation and sustainable use in a climate change context, going beyond the climate mitigation reasons: that the environment, and forests in particular, possibly can help rural households to better cope with climate fluctuations, at least as long as these fluctuations do not pass certain thresholds, and do not in the medium run create impacts that are too disequilibrating – which remain ‘out of sample’ data points in our study that we can hardly extrapolate. Eventually time-series studies will be needed to consolidate this hypothesis and to quantify the likely thresholds and disequilibrating effects for different climate zones of the developing world. Meanwhile, given the caveats mentioned, our study provides an overall cautiously optimistic picture regarding the flexibility of rural livelihoods to cope with and respond to the _de facto_ climate variability that we have seen over the last three decades, with forests and the environment playing an essential part of the story.

38