Adapting Smallholder Agriculture to Climate Change through Sustainable Land Management Practices: Empirical Evidence from North-West Ethiopia

Abstract

The objective of this paper was to determine the factors that influence farmers’ decision to use two categories of sustainable land management (SLM) practices as adaptation strategy to climate change in the North-West Ethiopia. It was based on analysis of data collected from 734 farm household heads and employed probit regression model to analyze the determinants of adaptation to climate change through SLM measures. Based on the model result, factors, like perception of climate change, exposure to adaptation techniques, education, perception of land degradation, slope, land prone to degradation, number of parcels, crop enterprise income, land size, farm distance, economically active family size and agro-ecology are found important in determining farmers’ decision to use structural land management practices. Likewise, perception of climate change, exposure to adaptation, farming experience, slope, crop enterprise income, land prone to degradation and agro-ecology are found important in affecting farmers’ decision to use non-structural land management practices as adaptation measure. Therefore, in line with the findings of the analysis, any intervention that promotes use of land management practices as adaptation strategy should take into account agro-ecology specific factors that are relevant to the nature of the land management practices. Moreover, since scaling up of SLM practices as adaptation strategy is resource intensive, it requires both public and non-public investment for providing technological support and raising awareness. Failure to do so would adversely affect crop productivity and exacerbate food insecurity problems at farm household level.