Abstract
The world’s climate is changing and will continue to change until strong action is taken to combat the effect of climate change on human livelihoods especially in Sub-Sahara Africa where capacities to cope are limited. Although there are several determinant factors that prevent smallholder farmers of Ethiopia to adopt CSA crop production so far, existing policies and actions to alleviate these obstacles remain inadequate. This study was therefore conducted to assess the determinants of the application of climate-smart agricultural crop production practices in Shashamene woreda.
A simple random sampling technique was employed to select 361 sample households for this study. To identify the existence of climate variability in the study area, thirty-six (1981- 2016) years’rainfall and temperature data from NMA were analyzed and compared with farmers’ perceptions. Descriptive statistics such as percentage and frequency, binary logistic regression, and MNL model were used to identify the perception of smallholder farmers towards climate change as well as major determinants of the application of CSA crop production practices. The results obtained from the long-term climate data showed that the inter-annual rainfall is relatively stable in amount and less variable in occurrence, while mean annual maximum and minimum temperatures less in inter-annual variability, but with consistent and steady annual increases by 0.031 and 0.0180C respectively. These results were in line with farmers' views on temperature and precipitation variabilities observed in the binary logistic model. Descriptive statistics indicated climate-smart agricultural crop production practices used by smallholder to cope the adverse effects of climate change were; precise fertilizer application, Integrated pest management, Use of improved varieties, Response farming, Organic and biofertilizer application, Conservation agriculture and crop diversification were;, 46.5%, 42%, 58.4%, 49%, 77.6%, and 57.6% respectively. The MN logistic regression analysis results also showed that age of household, family size, training and extension service, education, farm size, livestock asset, access to credit, farmers view on rainfall variability and farmers view on temperature variability were found to positively and significantly influence the application of these climate-smart agricultural crop production practices in the study area. Thus, most of the farmers are not exercising CSA crop production practices, despite they are well aware of the changes in rainfall and temperature. This is mainly due to the limitations associated with; weather information and extension services, level of farmers' education, credit access, which should be addressed by the concerned bodies. Therefore, the issue of CSA in crop production practices has to receive due attention in an effort to ensure the sustainability of the rural livelihood system and food security goal of the country in the face of climate change through all stockholder’s engagements to address the decisive impacts of the identified determining factors.
Keywords: Climate-smart, climate variability, climate change perception, livelihood, food security, the stockholder.
