Farmers' perceptions of climate change and the proposed agriculture adaptation strategies in a semi arid region of south India

Abstract

Climate change is recognised as one of the leading challenges affecting the performance of agriculture and the livelihood of people. Farmers are the hardest hit as they have to continuously respond to climatic variations. In order to understand farmers' perceptions of climate change and its impacts, and to identify adaptation needs, focus group discussions and semi-structured questionnaire surveys were carried out at the end of the south-west monsoon season in 2012 (Kharif cropping season in India). This helped to gather their immediate responses soon after the poor performance of south-west monsoon 2012. Khariff cultivation is locally known as ‘Kuruvai’ and is always under the influence of the south-west monsoon rainfall. Farmers' have perceived climate variability, and identified increasing temperature, delayed onset, intermittent dry spells and decreasing soil moisture as the critical factors affecting their cultivation. Some of them have started to adapt to these changes by cultivating only short-duration crops such as pulses, vegetables and flowers especially jasmine, but there is also a trend to put more land under fallow and abandoning the major cereal production. This study reveals that the farmers' perceptions are in accordance with the real trends analysis done on meteorological variables using Mann–Kendall test and Sens's slope estimator test, but not exactly matches with rainfall. Farmers have indicated their specific adaptation needs, a number of which could be incorporated into site-specific adaption strategies and policies.