Adapting to Thrive: Training and Access to Finance to Reduce Climate Vulnerability Among Smallholder Farmers in Nepal

Climate change poses serious risks to agricultural production, particularly for small-holder farmers who often have limited resources to adapt to changing conditions. This study evaluates the impacts of a bundled intervention—combining training and financial support—on the adoption of climate technologies and the resilience of smallholder farmers in Nepal. Leveraging exogenous variation in project roll-out resulting from administrative restructuring following the country’s new constitution, we show that the intervention increases the uptake of selected adaptation practices and improves household resilience. Adoption is associated with the timing of expected benefits and exposure to extreme weather, but not with demographic factors such as the gender or education level of household heads. These findings underscore the importance of climate adaptation practices in enhancing the resilience of vulnerable smallholders and highlight that adoption patterns vary by type and contextual relevance of the practice.