FARMERS’ PERCEPTION AND ADAPTATION STRATEGIES TO CLIMATE CHANGE: THE CASE OF WOREILLU DISTRICT OF AMHARA REGION, NORTHEASTERN ETHIOPIA

Climate change has adversely affected the livelihoods of people in developing countries where a large proportion of the population is heavily dependent on agriculture. Severe and repeated rise in temperature and rainfall failures caused loss of crops and livestock which resulted in food insecurity in Ethiopia. This study aims to investigate farmers’ perception and adaptation strategies to climate change in Woreillu District. Both qualitative and quantitative data obtained using primary and secondary sources. The primary data were collected from 155 randomly selected respondents through interview while the qualitative data using five focus group discussions. Secondary data on temperature and rainfall for the period 1993-2016 were also gathered from National Meteorological Agency Kombolcha sub-office. Descriptive statistics and Likert scale measurement were used to analyze perception of farmers and identify adaptation strategies to climate change. Multivariate Probit (MVP) model was estimated to identify factors affecting farmers’ choice of these strategies to climate change. The descriptive statistics result showed that 87.74% and 83.22% of the respondents perceived the existence of climate change with its attributes, temperature and rainfall, respectively. The result of MVP model revealed that the likelihood of farmers to adopt adjustment of planting date, agro-forestry, drought tolerant varieties, soil and water conservation practices, and irrigation were 54.1%, 38.9%, 47.8%, 63.4%, and 59.6%, respectively. It also showed that the joint probability of adopting and failure to adopting all adaptation strategies were 9.9% and 6.3%, respectively. Agro-ecological setting, sex, education level, landholding, farm income, non-farm income, livestock ownership, access to credit, extension visit, farmer-to-farmer extension, access to climate information and average distance from home to the farm have significant influence on the choice of climate adaptation strategies. Consequently, the future policy focus should target to improving the level of perception of farmers to climate change and adaptation strategies using extension service, encouraging farmer-to farmer extension and using different sources of climate information like media. It is also necessary to focus on improving literacy status, widening the sources and amount of farm and non/off farm income and enhancing accessibility of credit to improve the adaptive capacity of farmers