Farmers' choices and factors affecting adoption of climate change adaptation strategies: evidence from northwestern Ethiopia

Abstract

Climate change is a major environmental and socioeconomic challenge in Ethiopia in recent decades. The study site is one of the climate change prone areas affected by climate variability and extreme events. Therefore, a better understanding of area-specific and adaptation is crucial to develop and implement proper adaptation strategies that can alleviate the adverse effects of climate change. Therefore, this work was aimed to identify determinants of farmers' adoption of climate change adaptation strategies in Gondar Zuria District of northwestern Ethiopia. Primary data were collected through semi-structured questionnaires, observation, and interviews. Besides, the secondary data were also obtained from journal articles, reports, governmental offices, and the internet. The Multinomial and Binary logistic regression models with the help of the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) (21 th edition) were used to analyze the data. The multinomial logistic regression model was used to estimate the influence of the socioeconomic characteristics of sample households on the farmer's decision to choose climate change adaptation strategies. The result showed that age, gender, family size, farm income, and farm size had a significant influence on the farmers' choice of climate change adaptation strategies. The result also revealed that crop failure, severe soil erosion and shortages of water are major climate change-related problems than others. In order to alleviate these problems, farmers have implemented mixed farming, mixed cropping, early and late planting (changing sowing period), use of drought-resistant crop varieties, application of soil and water conservation techniques, shifting to non-farm income activities and use of irrigation. In contrast, access to climate information, total annual farm income, and market access variables are significant adoption determinants of climate change adaptation strategies by farmers' in the study site. Therefore, we recommend future adaptationrelated plans should focus on improving climate change information access, improving market access and enhancing research on the use of rainwater harvesting technology.

Climate change adaptation strategies and their predictors amongst rural farmers in Ambassel district, Northern Ethiopia

“…This is consistent with Menberu and Yohannes ( 2014 ) who argued that large family is associated with higher labour endowment, which would enable a HH to accomplish various adaptation strategies. The present findings are in line with the findings of Marie et al ( 2020 ) who showed that a unit increase in the family member of a farmer resulted in 2%, 3.1% and 1.6% increase in the probability of farmers using improved crop varieties, soil conservation technique and mixed cropping, respectively, as adaptation strategy. This finding is also agreeable with finding of Gebrehiwot and Veen ( 2013 ) who revealed that farmers with large family size have higher probability of implementing adaptation measures than their counterparts.…”

“…Therefore, they can easily adjust themselves to climate-related shocks. The findings are similar with the reports of Marie et al ( 2020 ) who indicated that a unit increase of a HH head significantly increases the probability of HH head using improved crop varieties and mixed cropping by 1.3% and 1.9%, respectively, in their study in north-western Ethiopia.…”

“…A HH that resides near to market has higher likelihood of using different crops with improved varieties by 1.2% than those farmers far from market access. The findings are supported by Marie et al ( 2020 ) who reported that HHs with market access have higher probability to adopt climate change adaptation measures than HHs with lack of market access. Similar results were reported by Hassan and Nhemachena ( 2008 ) who indicated that market access creates an opportunity to farmers to grow and thereby improving the income and climate resilience of farmers.…”

Factors Determining the Adoption of Strategies Used by Smallholder Farmers to Cope with Climate Variability in the Eastern Free State, South Africa

“…The binary logit model is more suitable in this case because the response on the dependent variable was either that a farmer had adopted or not adopted either traditional or scientific strategies. The binary logit model has been used in previous similar studies to investigate the relationship between a binary dependent variable and numerical explanatory variables [43][44][45][46].…”

A systems approach toward climate resilient livelihoods: A case study in Thai Nguyen province, Vietnam

“…This is because agriculture is greatly dependent on climate change and variability ( Parry et al., 2007 ; Sarker and Rashid, 2012 ). Especially, smallholder farmers and poor communities in developing countries are more vulnerable to the impact of climate change ( Ancog et al., 2019 ; Frimpong et al., 2020 ; Kurukulasuriya and Rosenthal, 2013 ; Marie et al., 2020 ; Sarker and Rashid, 2012 ). As such, there is a high need for adaptation strategies ( Adzawla et al., 2019 ; Aniah et al., 2019 ; Idrissou et al., 2020 ; Muema et al., 2018 ), particularly ecosystem-based adaptation ( Maina et al., 2020 ) and/or area-specific adaptation measures ( Marie et al., 2020 ).…”