Farmers' perceptions on the impact of climate change: Case study of the agricultural sector of Cambodia

Abstract

This research aimed to assess the perception of farmers on climate change impacts and to find out existing coping mechanisms for climate change adaptation. Quantitative and qualitative approaches were adopted with a sample size of 320 using IBM’s statistical software SPSS version 21, which was used to analyse data, mainly descriptive statistics (frequency and percentage). Results show that climate change was anticipated to seriously impact agricultural production, particularly rice crops, at a high perceived level. It is evident from the survey results that drought occurrences have the most significant impact on the economic destruction of households in the target areas due to their frequency, and damage is higher if compared to other disaster types. Followed by drought, flood is also one of the significant disaster effects on livelihoods. Based on the farmers’ practices, changing planting/harvesting data is the best choice for climate change adaptation. This low-cost option minimises the risk of climate change in agricultural practices. Changing crop variety is also one of the popular strategies for coping with climate change as it could tolerate current climate conditions and market situations. Other strategies, such as changing the level of inputs and investing in irrigation systems, were the secondary adaptation option in the target area because it is a high-cost option and some farmers could not afford it. In another case, even perceiving climate change, farmers did nothing because they did not have sufficient capacity to cope. Some challenges in climate change adaptation among Cambodian farmers include lack of money, poor potential for irrigation, shortage of land, lack of information and shortage of labour.