Impact of climate variability on household food availability in Tigray, Ethiopia

Abstract

Background: Currently, climate variability is a hot issue across the globe, especially in countries where rain-fed agriculture is a means of livelihood. Climate variability increases the risks of hunger in the region as it affects all four components of food security: food availability, food accessibility, food utilization and food stability. Rainfall shortage or excess hampers food production in the region, causing food insecurity and escalating famine. Extreme weather is affecting people indirectly through the sequential rather direct depletion of their assets. Therefore, looking on the impact of climate on food security is crucial to build a sustainable production system. Results: Randomized data from 150 households were collected and analyzed using SPSS software. Household Food Balance Model analysis indicates that 15.7% of the households met the recommended daily calorie intake of 2100 kcal per adult equivalent/day, while 84.3% of the households fell below the daily recommended calorie intake. The average calorie intake of the households covers only 56.2%. Female-headed households are found to be more food insecure than their male counterpart. Those food insecure households use different coping mechanism to avert the shortage like daily laborer, reducing meal, borrowing, selling productive asset and switching meals. Moreover, the annual rainfall of a 20-year record averaged 725 ml (with a standard deviation of 6.7), with the minimum and maximum records at 354.5 and 1037 ml, respectively. Similarly, the average precipitation concentration index (PCI) stood at about 24.4 ml, recording a minimum and maximum PCI of 15.6 ml and 41.7, respectively. Finally, the coefficient of variability of rainfall variability is 0.16, which indicates the variation in inter-annual rainfall distribution is medium. Conclusions: The result shows a high prevalence of food insecurity in the rural community with high prevalence in female-headed household. Therefore, strong intervention is required by the government and should exhaustively work on promoting irrigation, providing credit to farmers and subsidizing farm inputs to improve food security in rural Tigray.

Synergy between adaptations and resilience of livelihood from climate change vulnerability: A group-wise comparison of adapters and non-adapters

“…Our results indicate that farmers who are more educated would be more productive and efficient, and eventually, they would generate more farm income and overcome their poverty as compared to the less educated ones, and this argument is in line with the findings of other relevant studies [e.g. 23,37,51,[54][55][56].…”

“…Similar results have been observed for the case of total land for per capita income of headcount for both categories of farmers i.e. adapters and non-adapters, and through this finding our study validate the outcomes of a similar study by [37].…”

“…Farmers' income is sensitive, as loss of income opens up a path for poverty and food insecurity [36]. Natural disasters also have negative impacts on rural households' welfare [4,37]. It can be concluded from the given literature that CC has negative impacts on farmers' welfare.…”

Assessing the Vulnerabilities of Current and Future Production Systems in Punjab, Pakistan

“…Determinants of different adaptation strategies and their impact on food security and poverty level were quantified by References [35,42]. The impact of CC was assessed by Reference [43] on the food security of rural households. Results of the food balance model showed that more than 80% of rural households were food-insecure due to CC.…”

Climate change impacts on household food security and adaptation strategies in southern Ethiopia

“…Climate is an important resource both for crop and livestock productions in developing regions as farmers depend largely on rain fed agriculture (Birara et al., 2015; Coulibaly, 2015). However, keeping all other factors constant, climatic change could decline yield and reducing the availability of foods which aggravates household food insecurity (Butt et al., 2005; Weldearegay & Tedla, 2018). Growing consensus in the scientific community also indicates that higher temperature and changing precipitation levels resulting from climate change which reduces crop yields in developing countries (Alemu & Mengistu, 2019).…”