Farmers Choice and Factors Influencing Adoption of Adaptation Strategies to Climate Change in the Case of Abala Abaya Woreda, Wolaita Zone, Southern Ethiopia

Abstract

The study on farmers’ choice and factors influencing adoption of adaptation strategies to climate change was conducted in Abala Abaya Woreda, Wolaita zone, southern Ethiopia. The objective of the study is to assess the actual smallholder farmers’ choice and adaptation strategies to climate change in the study area. To achieve the objectives, daily meteorological and primary data generated from FGD, key informant such as elder people and employees of Abala Abaya and ADAFPO were used. Abala Abaya was selected purposively.  For this study, both simple random and stratified sampling techniques were employed to select the sample of respondent households. Among rural kebeles, four rural kebeles were selected. Out of total population (2166), 94 respondents were included by using Kothari equation and both descriptive and multinomial logistic regression model compared with the base category were used to analyze the data. The results showed that majority of the smallholder farmers employed different adaptation strategies to adapt to adverse effects of climate change including tracing for soil and water conservation, fertilizer application, livestock and crop diversification and using irrigation. The results further revealed that although the local people employed different strategies to adapt the adverse effects of climate-induced shocks, there were constraints that limit the HH’s adaptation strategies. These include lack of finance, shortage of land, lack of information and mass media, lack of skill and education and shortage of labor. The MNL model shown that different factors were found to be statistically significant related to terracing for soil and water conservation, fertilizer application, livestock diversification with supplementary feed and using irrigation at p ≤ 0.1 and 0.05 that is .024, .074, .007, .002, .000 and .006 for education, crop production, livestock ownership, farmers perception to climate change and land size, access to credit and access to market respectively for terracing for soil and water conservation. Access to information was found to be statistically significant related to fertilizer application at p ≤ 0.05 that is 0.035. In addition to this, size, farming, education and access to market at p ≤ 0.1 and 0.05 that is 0.074, 0.053, 0.001 and 0.000 respectively were found to be statistically significant related to livestock diversification with supplementary feed.

Keywords: adaptation strategies, climate change, factors, and farmers’

DOI: 10.7176/APTA/87-02

Publication date: January 31^st 2023