Abstract
Climate change is part of us and we are unlikely to avoid its impact. Impacts of climate change are severely felt within the agricultural sector, the division that strives to ensure food and nutrition security and contribute towards sustainable development in many of the developing countries. The only way farmers can survive in the face of climate change is through adaptation, a phenomenon that needs collaborative efforts. One of the critical driving factors of climate change adaptation is farmers’ perception towards tackling it, the focus of this paper. The main objective of this paper was to assess farmers’ perception towards tackling climate change. The population of the study was emerging farmers drawn from five districts of the Limpopo province, South Africa. The study used a two-stage cluster sampling technique to select a sample size of 206 emerging farmers. The dependent variable of the study was farmers’ perception about tackling climate change while the explanatory variables consisted of their socio-economic characteristics such as age, gender, farming experience and level of education. Discriminant Analysis was used to draw comparison between groups of farmers who perceived that climate change can be tackled and those who believed it cannot be. The results showed that socio-economic characteristics such as formal education, agricultural education, age group, farming experience and off-farm occupation significantly contributed towards farmers’ perception regarding tackling of climate change. Therefore, the study recommended that stakeholders should facilitate linkage of farmers with varied sources of support.
Highlights
Developing countries are vulnerable to climate change and variability, they are not affected (IPCC, 2007)
The results showed that the following variables; level of formal education (X3), agricultural education (X4), age group (X5), farming experience (X6) and occupation (X7) of farmers are all statistically significant at 5% level of significance
The results revealed that farmers who falls within older age group are of the view that climate change cannot be tackled, same as farmers who possess higher farming experience
Summary
Developing countries are vulnerable to climate change and variability, they are not affected (IPCC, 2007). Climate change remains to be one of the global tests against improved sustainable livelihood through its proven negative impacts on agricultural productivity (Pye-Smith, 2011). Climate change continues to significantly impact agricultural performance (Adeagbo et al, 2021). In Africa, both food and nutrition insecurities continues to be alarming as its agricultural productivity is severely affected by climate change (Ziervogel et al, 2006). Farmers in Africa are likely to experience tragic crop failures, reduced agricultural productivity and diseases outbreak through the impacts of climate change (Zoellick, 2009). Per IFAD (2010), it is likely not possible to avoid the impacts of climate change; and vital to promote strategies which farmers and other stakeholders can use to tackle climate change within their unit of operation. Farmers’ perceptions of climate change seem to shape their behaviour to adapt and influence their selections of adaptation to climate change (Nguyen et al, 2016)
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