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The purpose of this paper is to identify financial stress and the causes of financial stress for agricultural cooperatives and provide management recommendations to stakeholders including cooperatives’ managers, boards of directors and lenders.

This research used the geometric mean of the real rate of return on equity to identify financially stressed agricultural cooperatives. The real rate of return on equity allows the allocation of total financial stress among the return on assets, leverage and interest rate issues.

This study found that financially non-stressed agricultural cooperatives had a higher rate of return on equity and rate of return on assets, but lower leverage ratios and interest rates than stressed agricultural cooperatives. Further, non-stressed cooperatives had higher total assets and sales compared to stressed cooperatives. This suggests that smaller cooperatives are more likely to face financial stress than larger cooperatives. The decomposition of the financial problem showed that a substantial percentage of financial stress was correlated with a low return on assets or profitability. A smaller percentage of financial stress was due to financing decisions.

This study provides value by measuring the impact of profitability, leverage and interest rate on the financial performance of agricultural cooperatives. Results showed that a substantial proportion of financial stress was associated with a low return on assets. This indicates that profitability is a problem for agricultural cooperatives. This study also examines profitability during a period of volatile returns in production agriculture.

This paper aims to explore the local knowledge on climate change, its impacts and the responses they are making at the household or community level to deal with the changes on the basis of their experiences and perceptions.

The study was based on household survey conducted with one male and one female respondent in 202 households. Alongside, series of focused group discussions were conducted with local people to capture the perception on about climate change, its impacts and adaptation strategies applied to enhance their resilience capacity to changing climate. Rainfall and temperature data were collected from Department of Hydrology and Meteorology (DHM) for seven and four different stations, respectively, within Kathmandu Valley and analyzed to understand the climatic trend.

The perception of most of the local people on changes in temperature was almost in line with the recorded long-term climatic trend both showing an increasing trend, whereas the perception of decreasing both monsoon and non-monsoon rainfall did not match with the recorded data as the rainfall data analysis did not reflect any clear long-term pattern. People have been facing several impacts such as decrease in water sources, decrease in agricultural crop production, increase in new crop pest and weeds in agricultural crops. Local people are responding to these impacts as per their own skills and traditional knowledge.

This is totally original research article and the impacts and adaptations measures documented in this article may represent the case of peri-urban areas of least developed countries like Nepal.