Abstract
The recent research recommendations on the adaptations of poor are toward local specific investigations, aimed at a comprehensive understanding of the adaptation strategies through in-depth analysis of the status, and the explicit on how climate and non-climate global change processes constrain the inherent strategies. Intent to this idea, we have designed this study to assess the small-scale farmers' adaptation and coping strategies in southwestern Ethiopia. The agroecology approach steered in case-study design was used for the conceptual and analytical framework. The data collected from 335 households were analyzed for descriptive and multivariate analysis of variance and substantiated by qualitative data obtained through focused group discussion, interview, and observations. The significant differences were observed in the watershed among households in the case studies on their adoption of the identified adaptation and coping strategies. The sustainability of preferred strategies was different along case studies, solely determined by the impact magnitude of the adaptations constraining factors. Although free ecosystem-based strategies become less practical and replacing by new strategies in the watershed, the processes were gradual, internal to the community and managed through adaptive learning in the highland. However, the paths were perceived as toward maladaptive, resulted by the state interventions which disrupted free adaptations, deteriorated adaptive learning of the community, and shaped the adaptation responses toward the interventions in the kolla agroecology. The study implies that the situations of households' adaptation strategies are beyond the reflections of their respective production ecology, designated within climate variability in the previous studies. The structural land use dynamics and associated resource tenure insecurity have greater constraining effects on the strategies than the impacts of climate variability in the kolla. Thus, subsequent research interested in such contexts, and any plan for the development interventions should (re)consider the impacts of non-climate national/and global environmental change in shaping the adaptation and coping strategies of the local community.
Highlights
The researches on the local livelihood of the poor in the developing world come up with the complexity of adaptation constraints due to highly dynamic and challenging impacts of global environmental changes of climatic and non-climatic site-specific factors [1, 2]
The data collected from 335 households were analyzed for descriptive and multivariate analysis of variance and substantiated by qualitative data obtained through focused group discussion, interview, and observations
The synthesis of research on barriers of adaptation conducted on sub-Saharan African countries is typified by persistent poverty and socio-economic inequality, low levels of development, high dependence on climate-sensitive livelihood sectors, limited economic capacity, and numerous governance and institutional challenges on top of the impacts of climate change, resulting in low adaptive capacity and significant adaptation deficit [3, 4]; most importantly forced the community to mal-adaptation strategies [5]
Summary
The researches on the local livelihood of the poor in the developing world come up with the complexity of adaptation constraints due to highly dynamic and challenging impacts of global environmental changes of climatic and non-climatic site-specific factors [1, 2]. The identified processes of climate variability and structural land-use dynamics have global faces and impudent in the study area with distinguished spatiotemporal settings due to differences in climate state and variability situations across agro-climate in one hand and the historical socio-economic and political spurs of agroecology resulted mainly from national/ and global interventions on the other hand. To this end, such contextualization is crucial to understand the conditions of farmers’ adaptation strategies, the status, trends, causal linkage of the constraints to adaptation strategies along with the processes’ contexts in the study area [6]. We have designed this study to assess the small-scale farmers’ adaptation and coping strategies in southwestern Ethiopia
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