Climate Change Awareness in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa

Abstract

Climate change is one of the most important environmental issues facing the world today. The impact of climate change is a reality and it cuts across all climate-sensitive sectors including the Agriculture sector. It is well documented by several scientists, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other experts that climate change threatens sustainable economic development and the totality of human existence. This study will enable small scale maize farmers in Mpumalanga province to understand the challenges and the threat posed by climate variability and climate change. The study was conducted in Nkangala District, Mpumalanga province. Mpumalanga province remains the largest production region for forestry and the majority of the people living in Mpumalanga are farmers and they have contributed immensely to promote food security. However, due to the threat by climate variability and change, sectors such as the Agriculture, Water etc are experiencing the following pattern: (a) Putting livelihoods and food production at serious risks due to extreme climatic events, climate variability and change. It was noted that there is a need for climate change awareness across the agriculture sector. Currently, there is enough evidence that shows that climate change is affecting different elements of agriculture such as crops and livestock. Random sampling technique was used to select two hundred and fifty farmers to be interviewed. The questionnaires were administrated to household head farmers and included matters relating to household general information, climate change awareness, land characteristics, observation on climate change and agronomic practices including maize production. Data was analysed using the statistical for social sciences (SPSS version 20). Descriptive statistics was used to describe data and Univariate regression analysis was conducted to demonstrate the relationship and association of variables. It was noted that the majority of farmers in this province need capacity building and also climate change awareness initiatives which would assist these farmers to build the adaptive capacity, increase resilience and reduce vulnerability. By coming up with these kind of interventions it is believed that some of these farmers would be able to change their farming methods, diversify their cropping systems and also introduce drought tolerant crops in order for them to have good yields and also be able to generate good income.

Impact of Climate Change to Tourism Sector in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta

“…From statistics in the Mekong Delta, tourism authorities have highest evaluation of climate change impacts, followed by businesses and domestic tourists. This finding is in line with the findings from Maponya, Mpandeli, and Oduniyi (2013) and Nzeadibe, Egbule, Chukwuone, and Agu (2011) that availability of information and level of education would decide ones evaluation on an issue. In this study, tourism authorities who have access to more information on the climate-tourism relation, as well as higher quality knowledge, and are experts in the field tend to have a negative outlook of the impact of climate change on regional tourism.…”

Students in Climate Action: A Study of Some Influential Factors and Implications of Knowledge Gaps in Africa

“…A structured questionnaire was administered through the internet using Google forms. The questionnaire entailed close-ended questions which were drafted based on a review of questionnaires used by similar studies [6,7,9,46,47]. The link to the online questionnaire was administered through emails using a process similar to Salant and Dillman's [48] four-stage process for administering questionnaires by mail or post.…”

“…Watkins [5], for instance, argued that public perception can significantly influence future development and environmental policies. In this regard, public perceptions, awareness and knowledge of climate change have received increased attention in the literature in recent times [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. It is argued that individual behaviour is central to climate change because individuals influence large procedures of change and policy decisions [16].…”

An Evaluation on Climate Change Awareness in Tourism Sector in the Mekong Delta Region of Vietnam

“…As can be seen in Table 1 and Table 2, the chi-square test supports the argument that there is no significant association between gender and qualification and extent to which participants know about climate change. Due to the differences in the method of sampling the population, this finding is different to the outcome of Buloshi and Ramadan (2015) and Maponya et al (2013) which identified that gender and qualification is important in climate awareness levels. This study has targeted specific group of respondents (tourism authorities and businesses) and relied on the convenience sample method while other studies targeted the whole population and rely on a randomly sample method.…”

“…Climate change knowledge has been found to depend on various factors such as gender, ages, level of education, social status, income and availability of information (Buloshi & Ramadan, 2015;Mandleni & Anim, 2011;Maponya, Mpandeli, & Oduniyi, 2013;Nzeadibe et al, 2011;Odjugo, 2013). Nowadays, with the popularity of information technology and a variety of communication methods, the information is much quicker and easier to transfer between communities.…”