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Livelihood resilience to environmental changes in areas of Kenya and Cameroon: a comparative analysis

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Abstract

Climate change is a major challenge for the agricultural sector worldwide. Smallholder farmers are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change owing to their high dependence on agriculture for livelihood sustenance. Building smallholder farmers’ livelihood resilience to the adverse effects of environmental change is critical to addressing their vulnerabilities. This paper comparatively assessed livelihood resilience of smallholder farmers in Isiolo County, Kenya and Northwestern Cameroon in the face of environmental changes. The results are based on household surveys of 339 farmers in Kenya and 350 farmers in Cameroon. Findings showed that using the same measures of livelihood resilience, farmers’ resilience were significantly different in the Kenyan and Cameroonian study areas (p < 0.05), with farmers in Cameroon being relatively more resilient than farmers in Kenya. In both study sites, a statistically significant causal relationship (p < 0.05) existed between farmers’ resilience and livelihood capital assets such as human capital (number of household members between 18 to 55 years, education level), natural capital (number of farms, size of farmland, number of agroforestry trees on the farm), financial capital (access to bank account, ownership of livestock, ownership of farmland, trees, and farm equipment), social capital (participation in agricultural group), and physical capital (use of irrigation). However, some livelihood capital assets were more important for building resilience in Isiolo County, Kenya while others were more important in Northwestern Cameroon. On the basis of these findings, it is recommended that climate change adaptation interventions and policies should take a critical look at the determinants of resilience in order to come up with effective plans of action that can enhance farmers’ resilience to environmental changes occurring in Kenya and Cameroon, and elsewhere.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the communities and individuals in Kenya and Cameroon who participated in this research, as well as the research assistants and survey enumerators who played an integral role in data collection. The funding for the work in Kenya was supported by a US Borlaug Fellows in Global Food Security Graduate Research Grant (grant number 206766), which supports field and research costs for Quandt. The work in Kenya was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the University of Colorado under protocol no. 14-0059. The work in Cameroon was supported materially, morally and logistically by the Department of Forestry, Faculty of Agronomy and Agricultural Sciences of the University of Dschang, Cameroon.

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  1. Department of Forestry, University of Dschang, Dschang, Cameroon

    Nyong Princely Awazi

  2. Department of Geography, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, USA

    Amy Quandt

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  1. Nyong Princely Awazi
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Awazi, N.P., Quandt, A. Livelihood resilience to environmental changes in areas of Kenya and Cameroon: a comparative analysis. Climatic Change 165, 33 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-021-03073-5

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