Adapting to climate change in South Africa: commercial farmers' perception of and response to changing climate

Abstract

Understanding how and why farmers have responded to past climatic change is a necessary step to informing how to support current and future adaptation. This paper explores commercial farmers' perceptions of and responses to shifting climates in the Little Brak River area along South Africa's south coast. It aims to evaluate changes in the climate experienced in the area by comparing quantitative statistical analyses of temperature, rainfall and wind data recorded from 1967 to 2009, with qualitative historical narratives and formulated perceptions of change for the same period. This was undertaken in order to test the robustness of the narratives and to understand how farmers' perceptions and experiences drive their climate-related decisions. The narratives revealed that the farmers perceived a gradual but dramatic shift in climate over almost four decades, including increasing temperatures, changing annual rainfall patterns and shifts in predominant wind direction, mirrored by the recorded weather data that show similar results to the narratives. It is evident that farmers' experience with shifting climates has played a large part in driving their adaptive decision-making, but financial capital of these commercial farmers has also been a major factor enabling certain responses. This research contributes to the growing local and regional evidence of variability and change to climate systems, and documents how people have already responded to change in order to help build locally relevant climate change adaptation approaches that could potentially benefit a wider range of farmers.