Abstract
Climate change is a serious threat to the livelihoods of rural communities, particularly in mountainous areas because they are very sensitive to such changes. In this study, we assessed the household determinants to climate change adaptation drawing from a case study of agricultural adaptation in the Mount Rwenzori area of South Western Uganda. The study identified the major adaptation practices that are adopted by farmers to cope with the impacts of climate change and using available on-farm technologies. A total of 143 smallholder farmers were sampled and interviewed using field based questionnaires, field observations, and key informant interviews. Data was cleaned, entered and analysed using SPSS and Stata software for descriptive statistics. Thereafter, a Multinomial logistic regression model was used to assess the drivers of farmers’ choice for adaptation practices, factors influencing the choice of adaptation, and barriers. The major adaptation practices that were identified included; use of different crop varieties, tree planting, soil and water conservation, early and late planting, and furrow irrigation. Discrete choice model results indicated the age of the household head, experience in farming, household size, climate change shocks, land size, use of agricultural inputs, landscape position (location), and crop yield varied significantly (p > 0.05), which influenced farmers’ choice of climate change adaptation practices. The main barriers to adaptation included inadequate information on adaptation methods and financial constraints, leading us to conclude that contextual adaptation practices are more desirable for adoption to farmers. Adapting to climate change needs support from government and other stakeholders, however the implementation is more successful when appropriate and suitable choices are employed.
Highlights
There has been an increased focus on sustainable adaptation and mitigation practices for climate change impacts in various communities
The results revealed that shock drought was negatively related to the adoption of changing planting dates as a climate change adaptation practice, though being statistically significant (p ≤ 0.05)
This has a related aim of improving other biological farm practices, which include mulching and improved furrows. These methods are not sufficient to control soil erosion on farm, they do improve the soil structure especially when combined with mechanical methods of terracing, digging ditches, culverts, contour bunds, among others [40,41]. Adoption of these soil and water conservation (SWC) practices improves food security and the benefits associated with adaptation, for example, reducing soil erosion, increasing soil fertility, improving water management and water retention, which help farmers’ soils to obtain and retain nutrients [42,43,44]
Summary
There has been an increased focus on sustainable adaptation and mitigation practices for climate change impacts in various communities. This emanates from severe weather occurrences and substantial evidence of changes in climate that require people to adapt for a sustainable livelihood. Sudden increases in temperature results in moisture loss and has multiple knock-on effects on people’s basic livelihood enterprises, which causes great uncertainty [16]. This is more apparent in Sub-Saharan Africa, especially where a strong dependence on rainfed agriculture predominates and is already adversely affected by climatic changes [17]. In a country like Uganda, where agriculture supports over 70% of the people, this is a real cause for concern [18]
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