Frequent extreme weather events result in substantial economic losses for farming communities, posing a significant threat to the livelihood security of smallholder farmers in the Sundarbans region of India. Various agricultural enterprises in this area are continually at risk due to saline water intrusion, crop damage from heavy rainfall, and flooding. We examine the strategies farmers have adopted to sustain their livelihoods in the face of these extreme weather events. We collected primary data from a randomly selected sample of 1,200 farmers across six blocks in the Sundarbans region, focussing on farm households engaged in diverse agricultural enterprises, including field crop cultivation, livestock rearing, and fish farming. We used the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to prioritize the coping mechanisms adopted by these farming communities. The assessment of coping mechanisms was based on four criteria: ease of implementation, cost, effectiveness, and durability for long-term application. Effectiveness got the highest weights of 0.492 followed by the durability of the coping strategy weights of 0.309. Coping mechanisms pertaining to managing soil health against soil salinity, raising livestock and fish species as well as cultivating field crops were identified and prioritized according to their perceived efficacy against extreme weather events. Our results can inform the formulation of robust and sustainable development policies for agricultural and allied sectors in the Indian Sundarbans.

An outflow of continental haze occurs from Indo-Gangetic Basin (IGB) in the North to Bay of Bengal (BoB) in the South. An integrated campaign was organized to investigate this continental haze during December 2013-February 2014 at source and remote regions within IGB to quantify its radiative effects. Measurements were carried out at three locations in eastern India; 1) Kalas Island, Sundarban (21.68 degrees N, 88.57 degrees E) - an isolated island along the north-east coast of BoB, 2) Kolkata (22.57 degrees N, 88.42 degrees E) - an urban metropolis and 3) Siliguri (26.70 degrees N, 88.35 degrees E) - an urban region at the foothills of eastern Himalayas. Ground-based AOD (at 0.5 mu m) is observed to be maximum (1.25 +/- 0.18) over Kolkata followed by Siliguri (0.60 +/- 0.17) and minimum over Sundarban (0.53 +/- 0.18). Black carbon concentration is found to be maximum at Kolkata (21.6 +/- 6.6 mu g . m(-3)) with almost equal concentrations at Siliguri (12.6 +/- 5.2 mu g . m(-3)) and Sundarban (12.3 +/- 3.0 mu g . m(-3)). Combination of MODIS-AOD and back-trajectories analysis shows an outflow of winter-time continental haze originating from central IGB and venting out through Sundarban towards BoB. This continental haze with high extinction coefficient is identified up to central BoB using CALIPSO observations and is found to contribute similar to 75% to marine AOD over central BoB. This haze produces significantly high aerosol radiative forcing within the atmosphere over Kolkata (75.4 Wm(-2)) as well as over Siliguri and Sundarban (40 Wm(-2)) indicating large forcing over entire IGB, from foothills of the Himalayas to coastal region. This winter-time continental haze also causes about similar radiative heating (1.5 K . day(-1)) from Siliguri to Sundarban which is enhanced over Kolkata (3 K . day(-1)) due to large emission of local urban aerosols. This high aerosol heating over entire IGB and coastal region of BoB can have considerable impact on the monsoonal circulation and more importantly, such haze transported over to BoB can significantly affect the marine hydrological cycle. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.