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Factors Influencing Smallholder Farmers’ Climate Change Perceptions: A Study from Farmers in Ethiopia

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Abstract

Factors influencing climate change perceptions have vital roles in designing strategies to enrich climate change understanding. Despite this, factors that influence smallholder farmers’ climate change perceptions have not yet been adequately studied. As many of the smallholder farmers live in regions where climate change is predicted to have the most negative impact, their climate change perception is of particular interest. In this study, based on data collected from Ethiopian smallholder farmers, we assessed farmers’ perceptions and anticipations of past and future climate change. Furthermore, the factors influencing farmers’ climate change perceptions and the relation between farmers’ perceptions and available public climate information were assessed. Our findings revealed that a majority of respondents perceive warming temperatures and decreasing rainfall trends that correspond with the local meteorological record. Farmers’ perceptions about the past climate did not always reflect their anticipations about the future. A substantial number of farmers’ anticipations of future climate were less consistent with climate model projections. The recursive bivariate probit models employed to explore factors affecting different categories of climate change perceptions illustrate statistical significance for explanatory variables including location, gender, age, education, soil fertility status, climate change information, and access to credit services. The findings contribute to the literature by providing evidence not just on farmers’ past climate perceptions but also on future climate anticipations. The identified factors help policy makers to provide targeted extension and advisory services to enrich climate change understanding and support appropriate farm-level climate change adaptations.

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Acknowledgments

The first author has received a scholarship from Katholischer Akademischer Ausländer-Dienst (KAAD) and the Laura Bassi award from Technische Universität München for PhD study. This study is part of the PhD work. The authors would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, which helped us to improve the manuscript. We would like to thank Habtamu Y. Ayenew for very valuable discussions and suggestions on the analysis.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Chair of Agricultural Production and Resource Economics, Technische Universität München, Alte Akademie 14, Freising, Germany

    Lemlem Teklegiorgis Habtemariam, Getachew Abate Kassa & Alois Heissenhuber

  2. Chair of Economics of Horticulture and Landscaping, Technische Universität München, Alte Akademie 16, Freising, Germany

    Markus Gandorfer

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  1. Lemlem Teklegiorgis Habtemariam
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  2. Markus Gandorfer
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Correspondence to Lemlem Teklegiorgis Habtemariam.

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Habtemariam, L.T., Gandorfer, M., Kassa, G.A. et al. Factors Influencing Smallholder Farmers’ Climate Change Perceptions: A Study from Farmers in Ethiopia. Environmental Management 58, 343–358 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-016-0708-0

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