AWARENESS AND PERCEPTION OF THE HILLY TRIBES ON THE ISSUES OF CLIMATE CHANGER. Arunachalam and R. SasmithaAbstract The present study focuses on the awareness and perception of tribal farmers towards climatic issues andtheir contributing factors. The study was conducted in The Nilgiris district. Totally 60 tribal farmers wereselected from two identified villages from Panthalur taluk considering the maximum area under tribalpopulation. Ex-post facto research design was used. There were totally 5 major issues documented underthis study. For each issue, possible contributing factors were identified and ranked by employing Garrettranking method. The results shows that majority of the respondents were very much aware about theerratic variations in rainfall distribution, temperature and snowfall distribution. More than half of therespondents have strong perception that deforestation causes erratic variations in rainfall distribution andnormal snowfall pattern is getting disturbed due to erratic variation in temperature and rainfall in theregion. A considerable portion of the respondents were very much undecided about the extreme conditionof relative humidity and unpleasant wind velocity which may be due to their lack of awareness. Extensionfunctionaries should take necessary steps to sensitize local tribal farmers on these issues along withappropriate management strategies. |