Abstract
Drought is an extreme and frequent event in the north-west region of Bangladesh and it adversely affects the livelihood of the farming community. Identifying the coping strategies that farmers use in the face of drought is crucial in order to understand how farmers minimize the effects of drought on their production, especially in the face of climatic changes that may impact the occurrence of extreme weather events. The purpose of this study was to assess farmers’ coping strategies for droughts by identifying which strategies are used and the influencing factors. A mixed methods approach using qualitative and quantitative data was employed. Preliminary data were collected using structured interviews and focus group discussions in which the findings were triangulated in order to design a questionnaire. The study respondents were 100 farmers operating in north-west Bangladesh. The findings were analyzed using descriptive statistics, coefficient of correlation, multiple linear and step-wise regressions. The results reveal that the respondents have limited drought coping strategies, even though the region is prone to frequent droughts. Among the fourteen identified drought coping strategies, the use of deep tube wells for irrigation water was the most widely reported and the farmers perceived it as the most important coping strategy. Shallow tube wells closely followed as the second most commonly used coping strategy reported by the respondents. Among the identified coping strategies, the least practiced was the use of treadle pumps. The findings from the study showed that age, education, farm size, annual family income, extension media contact, and organization participation were significantly associated with the choice of coping strategy that the farmers employed. Additionally, farm size, age, and education were identified as influential factors that affected the farmers’ choice of which drought coping strategies to use. The study identified important issues for policy makers engaged with governmental programs that aim to enhance the farmers’ drought coping mechanisms. The methods employed and the results of this study could be usefully applied in other districts of Bangladesh, or other areas of the world suffering from the negative effects of drought on agricultural production.
Highlights
Climate change (CC) is continuous and it is an issue of great concern for scientists around the world [1]
The age of the farmers was found to be positively correlated with utilizing more drought coping strategies This confirmed the findings of [44], where the age of the farmer was a significant and positive determinant towards adaptation decisions to CC effects
The findings indicate that the use of Deep tube well (DTW) for irrigation water was the most important drought coping strategy, with an adaptation strategy index (ASI) of 235, followed by Shallow tube well (STW), with an ASI of 189
Summary
Climate change (CC) is continuous and it is an issue of great concern for scientists around the world [1]. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that if high GHG emissions continue, average temperatures will rise by more than 2 ◦ C in the South Asian region and will increase by 3 to 6 ◦ C by the mid to end of the 21st century [4]. The agricultural sector is negatively affected through disasters brought about by CC, including droughts, floods, irregular precipitation, and salinity intrusion [7,8]. These changes are expected to continue to affect vulnerable countries with uneven rainfall, water scarcity and extreme temperatures [9]
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