A decision support system to assess climate change impacts on rural communities

Climate change is likely to affect the way in which people live. Natural resources such as groundwater, surface water and wood form a vital component of the livelihood in rural communities and are used extensively in rural areas where basic services have not yet been provided. The effect of climate change on all these natural resource may impact the lives of those in rural communities. Climate change is already starting to affect some of the poorest and most vulnerable communities around the world. The aim of the dissertation was to develop a framework to assess the vulnerability of rural communities to climate change. This framework used the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Conceptual Framework as a guideline, but also incorporated the results of face-to-face interviews conducted with members of a selected community. The purpose of the interviews was to interrogate the communities’ level of awareness on climate change and to gain an understanding of the parameters influencing the community’s vulnerability to the effects of climate change. The developed framework allows the calculation of a numerical value which represents the vulnerability of a community to climate change. To illustrate its application, the framework was used to assess the vulnerability of a selected community. In the same way, the framework can be applied to other rural communities in South Africa to assess their vulnerabilities and to prioritise those communities where funds and resources should be allocated when combatting the impacts of climate change. Further work to improve the framework developed in this study is recommended. These recommendations include: 1) considering other existing frameworks to better understand climate change impacts on rural communities and to strengthen and improve the assessment of the vulnerabilities faced by rural communities, 2) expanding the study to include more rural villages in order to better understand how other rural communities are affected by climate change and to establish recommendations which could assist in finding solutions on a wider scale for rural communities that are affected by climate change, 3) including in the framework adaptation measures to protect biodiversity and ecological parameters that support the livelihood of the community, and, 4) including long-term projection of the changes brought on by climate change to refine and improve the framework.