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Farm Level Adaptation to Climate Change: The Case of Farmer’s in the Ethiopian Highlands

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Abstract

In Ethiopia, climate change and associated risks are expected to have serious consequences for agriculture and food security. This in turn will seriously impact on the welfare of the people, particularly the rural farmers whose main livelihood depends on rain-fed agriculture. The level of impacts will mainly depend on the awareness and the level of adaptation in response to the changing climate. It is thus important to understand the role of the different factors that influence farmers’ adaptation to ensure the development of appropriate policy measures and the design of successful development projects. This study examines farmers’ perception of change in climatic attributes and the factors that influence farmers’ choice of adaptation measures to climate change and variability. The estimated results from the climate change adaptation models indicate that level of education, age and wealth of the head of the household; access to credit and agricultural services; information on climate, and temperature all influence farmers’ choices of adaptation. Moreover, lack of information on adaptation measures and lack of finance are seen as the main factors inhibiting adaptation to climate change. These conclusions were obtained with a Multinomial logit model, employing the results from a survey of 400 smallholder farmers in three districts in Tigray, northern Ethiopian.

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Notes

  1. In this paper, we used the definition of a household usually employed by economist. A household is understood as a domestic unit with autonomous decision-making regarding production and consumption (Ellis 1988; Roberts 1991). The assumption underlying this definition is that a household has an unequivocal hierarchy of authority. In addition, the head of household have the power and exercising decision-making over the household’s resources.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank the Editor and three anonymous referees for their constructive comments and suggestions which have helped to improve the original version of this manuscript.

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  1. University of Twente, Hengelosestraat 99, 7514 AE, Enschede, Overijssel, Netherlands

    Tagel Gebrehiwot & Anne van der Veen

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  1. Tagel Gebrehiwot
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Correspondence to Tagel Gebrehiwot.

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Gebrehiwot, T., van der Veen, A. Farm Level Adaptation to Climate Change: The Case of Farmer’s in the Ethiopian Highlands. Environmental Management 52, 29–44 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-013-0039-3

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