Abstract
Over half of the world’s population depends on smallholder farms for their daily food needs. However, high levels of vulnerability and low levels of resilience to the adverse effects of climatic variations and changes constitute major threats to smallholder farms and farmers. It is within this context that this paper assessed the levels of resilience of smallholder farmers as well as the factors affecting smallholder farmers’ resilience to climate change in north western Cameroon. A mixed research approach was adopted during data collection, and data analysis was done using descriptive and inferential statistics. It was found that climate extremes were the order of the day, and farmers perceived income level, practice of agroforestry and land accessibility as the main determinants of resilience. The main resilience option practiced by most smallholder farmers was agroforestry. Chi-square and t-test statistics showed the existence of a statistically significant difference (p<0.05) between smallholder farmers resilience to climate change and different environmental, institutional and socio-economic variables. Logistic regression coefficients showed the existence of a statistically significant cause-effect relationship (p<0.05) between farmers’ resilience to climate change and different environmental, institutional and socio-economic variables such as income level, land accessibility, credit accessibility, information accessibility and number of farms. From the foregoing, income level, land accessibility, credit accessibility, information accessibility and number of farms play a significant role towards enhancing smallholder farmers’ resilience to climate change. Policy makers therefore need to factor in these variables when crafting policies geared towards improving smallholder farmers’ resilience to climate change.
Highlights
The desire of the national, regional and international policy makers to combat global environmental challenges is unquestionable.[1]. This is evidenced by the crafting and adoption of seventeen (17) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – agenda 2030, wherein the fight against climate change features prominently as goal number thirteen.[2,3]
Climatic Variations and Changes From the analysis of climate data, it was found that climatic elements especially temperature and rainfall have experienced significant fluctuations in the past five decades (Figure, 1, 2 and 3)
The model correctly classified up to 80% of the factors influencing smallholder farmers’ resilience to climate change
Summary
The desire of the national, regional and international policy makers to combat global environmental challenges is unquestionable.[1] This is evidenced by the crafting and adoption of seventeen (17) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – agenda 2030, wherein the fight against climate change features prominently as goal number thirteen.[2,3] The increasing concentration of greenhouse gases especially nitrous oxide, methane, carbon dioxide, chlorofluorocarbons and others in the atmosphere has led to unusual levels of global warming.[1,4] These unprecedented concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere result mainly from human activities like tropical forest degradation, burning of fossil fuels, and wanton deforestation.[5,6,7,8] Adaptation and/or mitigation are the two options mankind has to deal with the existential threats posed by climate change.[6] For the agricultural sector, adaptation to climate change is seemingly the shortterm option while mitigation of climate change is the long-term option.[9,10,11,12,13] it is incumbent to promote climate-smart, environmentally friendly, and sustainable agricultural practices especially in the smallholder farming sector which is amongst the most vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change
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