A B S TR A C TNowadays climate change is amongst the most critical problems affecting the wellbeing of human beings. In Ethiopia, where the majority of the population rely on agriculture, climate change has adverse effects. In rural areas, low resilient capacity to shocks exacerbates the impacts of climate change such as production failure, which in turn enormously contributed to food insecurity. In view of this fact, this study assessed the perceptions and practices of climate change and related adaptation and mitigation strategies among farmers in the Konta Special District, Southern Ethiopia, by using a mixed research approach involving a concurrent method of data collection and analysis. Quantitative data for this study was generated from 296 randomly selected survey households; while, qualitative data was collected through focus group discussions, key informant interviews, and in-depth interviews. The findings of this study revealed that sample respondents recognized the occurrence climate change and its increasing adverse effects. Regarding its cause, a substantial proportion (46.8%) of the respondents perceived climate change as the wrath of God and a natural phenomenon rather than attributing it to human activities. Participants also acknowledged that anthropogenic factors such as deforestation are the major driving factors for climate change. The study found that farmers affirmatively perceive the feasibility of the majority of the strategies embraced in the Climate Resilient Green Economy initiative endorsed at national level. Understanding that climate change effects are less reversible, farmers were found to practice mitigation strategies such as afforestation, agroforestry and agricultural intensification more than adaptation strategies. Adaptation strategies such as fuel conservation technologies were perceived costly and complex given the economic capacity and skill of farmers. Hence, rural and agricultural development policies should initiate context sensitive adaptation and mitigation strategies to enhance the capability of smallholders to deal with the effects of climate change.

This study examined the livelihood strategies and food security situation of rural households around Derba Cement Factory by taking a randomly selected sample of 215 heads of farm households from three rural kebeles. A mixed research approach was employed to triangulate concurrently collected data through household survey, key informant interviews and focus group discussions. Informed by the sustainable rural livelihood framework, descriptive statistics were used to describe rural households’ livelihood strategies and challenges they faced while inferential statistics was employed to explain households’ food security situations with different livelihood combinations. While mixed farming was found to be the mainstay of the household economy, small-scale irrigation and extracting forest products were also used as supplementary economic activities. More than a half of the respondents (52.5%) reported at least one non-farm activity. Land shortage was identified as a major constraint to expand crop production and this was further aggravated by the activities (e.g. querying leading to displacement) of the Derba Cement Factory. This further affected household labor allocation and natural resources utilization. The result of household food (in) security access scale indicated that 59% of the respondents have experienced food access insecurity in 2016. However, respondents who combined agriculture and non-farm activities appeared relatively more food secure than those engaged in agriculture alone or in non-farm activity only. Overall, households with multiple livelihood strategies had diverse food entitlements to maintain sustainable food consumption. Yet, necessity induced diversification was found to affect food access security of households. This calls for inclusive policies and strategies that integrate rural non-farm activities to subsistence farming in order to assure sustainable livelihood in rural communities.