Abstract
With current global climate change conditions, the urgency to provide agricultural knowledge on adaptation has risen. The dearth of climate change information is one amongst many agricultural production challenges faced by the majority of rural farming communities. This study aimed to identify smallholder farmers’ sources of climate change information and constraints to their coping and adaptation. Descriptive statistical tools, mean scores and the ‘problem confrontation index’ (PCI) were used to assess and describe the study’s findings. Analysis revealed that public extension services play a minute role in rural farmers’ climate change knowledge; they get their information elsewhere. The most critical constraint to climate change coping and adaptation in the study area was lack of access to agricultural extension services.
Highlights
Agricultural production profoundly depends on climate elements such as rainfall and temperature [1,2]
The Amathole District Municipality Integrated Development Plan (ADM IDP) [71] review corroborates that the constraints facing agriculture in most of the rural parts of Amathole has impinged agricultural development beyond the subsistence level
The analysis of climate change information sources indicated that television, radio, informal meetings, local newspapers and public extension services ranked top in order of importance among the 16 sources of information identified in the study area
Summary
Agricultural production profoundly depends on climate elements such as rainfall and temperature [1,2]. Evidences from studies [3,4,5,6] show increasing impacts of recurrent inconsistences of climate variables on agricultural production. Global environment could be continually subjected to storms, floods, droughts, and other climate change threats with intense impacts on agricultural yields. High temperatures coupled with wet conditions creates conducive environments for the breeding and growth of pests and pathogenic organisms thereby increasing incidences of pests and diseases on crops, livestock and poultry [4,5,6,17,18,19]. 127), these impacts “may result in an already marginal farming communities becoming further impoverished” as the agricultural net revenue of smaller farms seem to be most severely affected by climate change. There is, severe economic consequences on the gross domestic products (GDP) of nations, income and consumption pattern of the most vulnerable population [10]
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