Abstract
Improving farm-level use of multiple climate change adaptation strategies is essential for improving household food security, particularly against a backdrop of a high risk of climatic shocks. However, the empirical foundation for understanding how farm households choose multiple climate-smart practices is far from being established. In this paper, the effects of household, farm and climatic factors on farmers’ decisions to use multiple adaptation practices are analysed. A survey of 921 farm households and 4312 farm plots combined with historical climate data in the Nile Basin of Ethiopia is explored using multivariate and random effect ordered probit econometric models. Results show agricultural production can be characterized by complementarities between adaptation practices. This result is important to designing packages of adaptation practices. The econometric results confirm that social capital, tenure security and climatic shocks are important determinants of the choice of the type and number of adaptation practices. The results suggest the need for carefully designing combinations of adaptation strategies based on agro-ecological conditions.
Highlights
Despite the growing consensus that climate change is making agricultural development more challenging, there is little consensus on how agricultural practices should change in response (FAO, 2014; IPCC, 2007)
Agricultural water management and manure are used by 53%, 41% and 30% of the plots, respectively
This suggests that improving communication infrastructure and access to information is important to enhance the use of climate change adaptation practices through facilitating input and output transport, reducing the opportunity cost of farmers’ time, and obtaining timely market information and other information about production and the changing climate
Summary
Despite the growing consensus that climate change is making agricultural development more challenging, there is little consensus on how agricultural practices should change in response (FAO, 2014; IPCC, 2007). Over the last few years, a range of climate-smart agriculture approaches have been recommended to build adaptive capacity that enhances resilience while at the same time increasing yields and lowering GHG emissions through soil, water and plant nutrient management (Campbell et al, 2014). Despite these efforts, adoption of adaptation practices has been low and uneven (Deressa, Hassan, Alemu, Yesuf, & Ringler, 2008; Shiferaw, Okello, & Reddy, 2009). To the best of our knowledge, empirical evidence on the heterogeneous effects of climatic characteristics on the number of adaptation practices is scarce
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