Effects of Climate Change on the Livelihood of Rural Farmers! An Empirical Assessment
Author : Dr. R Dayanandan and Meaza Woubishet
Abstract :
The world is facing multiple challenges in the 21st century amongst global warming and climate change is crucial and Ethiopia is not exceptional. The focus of this paper is assessing the effect of climate change on the livelihoods of rural farmers in Burji district of Ethiopia. Descriptive and explanatory research design was employed and primary as well as secondary data were used to accomplish the research. To address the specific objectives, multi-stage sampling techniques were employed to select four villages from three agro-ecological zone and 177 sample households. The effect of climate change was assessed in line with livelihood frame work framed by Department for International Development (DFID). Data analysis was done using descriptive statistics and multinomial regression model. The findings indicate that the rain fall distribution was irregular and the annual total rain fall decreased over the years and the temperature has increased by 7.10C during 2007-2020 in the study area. The major causes for the climate change in the study area are deforestation, over grazing, fertilizer and pesticides application and bush burning. There were many problems related to climate change among the farmers and majority of respondents stopped their education in primary level and they become sick for sometimes. There was a water shortage and heat stress on plants as well as changes of cultivation pattern due to erratic rain fall in the study area. There are problems of low savings among farmers, less access of credit and increasing the price of major crops which significantly affected food security. The types of adaptation strategies were crop diversification, mixed farming, crop variety selection, adjusting planting time, soil and water conservation and irrigation farming. Out of 16 explanatory variables included in the multinomial logit regression model to identify the factors influencing climate change adaption strategies, 10 variables were found positively influenced while 6 were negatively influenced. Therefore, the issue of adaptive capacity should be the first agenda for every stake holder, government and NGOs to enhance the capacity of rural farmers to improve their livelihoods.
Keywords :
Adaptation strategies, climate change, livelihood, rural farmers
