Assessing climate change-induced poverty of mixed crop-livestock smallholders in Wolaita zone

Abstract

Climate changes manifest itself through increased temperature, a more variable rainfall and more extreme events. As a matter of fact, smallholder farmers who produce climate-sensitive crop-livestock species are among the most affected to it due to reliance on rainfall, inadequate use of irrigation, and weak adaptive capacity. Accordingly, there are little evidences that reveals climate change is causing multi-dimensional poverty among mixed crop-livestock smallholders. Thus, this study was aimed at analyzing climate change-induced multidimensional poverty and its factors which contribute to it. Thus, data from households on socio-economic and environmental issues and thirty years rainfall and temperature data were collected. At the meantime, multi-dimensional poverty index, probit model, parametric test were applied to analyze data along with descriptive statistics. Accordingly, eleven variables showed statistically significant differences between poor and non-poor. Furthermore, the temperature in the study area was increased but rainfall trend decreased overtime. Since the livelihood of smallholder farmers is extremely dependent on rain-fed agriculture, the change in these climatic parameters negatively affected their livelihood. On the other hand, using a multidimensional-based measure of poverty; the estimates show that 82% of the sample households were multi-dimensionally poor. The incidence of poverty was highest in Abala Gefeta village (89%) followed by Bossa Wanche (80%) and Abala Shoya (84%). The result of probit regression estimation procedure revealed that variables such as access to climate information, productive safety net program and off/non-farm income at (1%), credit amount gained at (5%), sex, utilizing improved agricultural technologies and livestock holding at (10%) affects climate change-induced poverty negatively and significantly. Therefore, it is concluded that climate change-induced poverty of crop-livestock smallholders would be reduced through improving agricultural technology utilization by the farmers and providing timely climatic information and putting early warning system in place.