Determinants of farmers choice of adaptation to climate variability in Dera woreda, south Gondar zone, Ethiopia

Birtukan Atinkut,Abraham Mebrat

doi:10.1186/s40068-015-0046-x

Abstract

Climate variability causes enormous suffering particularly on rural farmers’ whose livelihoods depend largely on rain-fed agriculture. Ethiopia in general the Dera woreda in particular is not an exception in this regard. The main purpose of this study was to identify the determinant factors that influence the choice of farmers’ adaptation strategies to climate variability from 110 households in Dera woreda, south Gondar zone, Ethiopia. Accordingly, descriptive statistics and Multi-Nominal Logit model (MNL) were employed to analyze the data on household and demographic characteristics and the determinant factors that influences the choice of farmers adaptation, respectively. The results showed that the major climatic related hazards in the study area were flooding (31.8 %), followed by hailstorm (19 %), drought (17.3 %), crop-pest (16.4 %) and livestock epidemic (15.5 %). In order to tackle the effects of climate variability, households in the area pursued crop diversification (38.2 %), soil and water conservation (31.8 %) and seasonal migration (19 %) as the most dominant and frequent adaptation measures. The MNL model also found that the adaptation measures taken by the households are influenced by some predictor variables such as gender of the household head, age, access to extension services, agro-ecological location, farm size, family size and perception on temperature. In order to overcome the challenges that the farmers have been facing in employing various adaptation measures in response to climate variability, the government needs to support them in promoting the appropriate adaptation measures suitable in varied agro-ecological zones.

Highlights

Climate variability causes enormous suffering on rural farmers’ whose livelihoods depend largely on rain-fed agriculture
The majority of female and male headed households’ despite differences in sex, age, social roles and agro-ecology perceived climate variability in the study area manifested in terms of erratic rainfall and an increase in temperature for the last couple of years, months and decades
The explanatory variables that are hypothesized to affect the dependent variable as indicated in Table 1 are agro-ecology, family size, farm size, access to extension service, age, sex of the household head, perception on temperature, farming experience, farmer to farmer extension, water access and climate information while the outcomes of the dependent variables are cropdiversification, soil and water conservation and seasonal migration

Summary

Introduction

Climate variability causes enormous suffering on rural farmers’ whose livelihoods depend largely on rain-fed agriculture. The main purpose of this study was to identify the determinant factors that influence the choice of farmers’ adaptation strategies to climate variability from 110 households in Dera woreda, south Gondar zone, Ethiopia. Crop-pest, livestock epidemic, hailstorm, drought, flood become the most dominant and frequently occurring climate related shocks in the region in general in Dera woreda in particular (Misganaw et al 2014). The main purpose of this study was to identify the determinant factors that affect farmers’ choice of adaptation in Dera woreda

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion