Review on Perception and Adaptation Strategies of Smallholder Farmers’ to Climate Change in Ethiopia

Abstract

Ethiopian Smallholder farmers is highly vulnerable to climate variability and  change due to its great reliance on  climate sensetive economy .Different empirical evidence's has put forward about climate change perception and adaptation practices.However, the findings of  major  studies are highly aggregated and are of little help in addressing  local peculiarities of perception and adaptation strategies .While, others were vague to understandand  and finally difficult to implement at farm level. Hence ,this paper reviews the empirical literature on smallholder farmers’ perceptions and adaptation strategies of climate change in Ethiopia with specific objectives of; to review the Smallholder framers’ perception to climate change, to identify climate change adaptation strategies used by Smallholder farmers’ and to review factors that determine smallholder farmers choice of  climate change adaptation strategies in Ethiopia.This paper was prepared through wide spread review of  empirical  evidence's. The review found that the majority of farmers in Ethiopia are aware of climate change in average change in temperatures and rainfall pattern with passion of weather extremes such as droughts ,floods,pest and disease manifestation. To deal with up the unfavorable sound effects of climate change, farmers have adopted strategies like crop diversification, using improved varieties, changing planting and harvesting dates, irrigation, planting tree crops, water and soil conservation techniques,switching to non-farm income activities, marketing during forage shock, using drought tolerant breed andfodder preservation.But , preference of adaptation strategies differs from place to place, farms to farms, and households capacity. At household level, most of the empirical evidence revealed 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.The review result depicted that  there is much dearth of empirical evidences regarding  livestock sectors so far as much of the research is focused on crop sector's.Therefore, it has been suggested to further investigate deep rooted emperical evidence's on adaptation strategies of livestock sectors and available indigenous knowledge especially in pastoral  areas.Further more, there is a need to explore impacts of climate change and single adaptation strategies on livelihood of smallholder's farmers at each farm level autonomously. Keywords: adaptation strategies; climate change; Ethiopia, perceptions; Smallholder farmer's DOI: 10.7176/IAGS/82-03 Publication date: May 31 st 2020