Abstract

Climate variability and change are a serious threat to the livelihoods of rural communities because they are very sensitive to such changes. This study assesses the major adaptation strategies pursued by farm households to climate variability and change impact in Benishangul Gumuz regional state, western Ethiopia which is harshly affected by climate change stresses. The data were collected from a randomly selected 385 sample households through interview using field-based questionnaires and focus group discussions and analyzed using descriptive statistics. The results pointed out that the likelihood of households to adopt crop diversity, soil and water conservation practice, small scale irrigation, crop rotation, adjusting planting date and improved crop varieties were 54.2%, 49.8%, 47.3%, 45.3%, 44.4% and 43.5% respectively. Moreover, the results indicated that the joint likelihood of using all adaptation strategies was only 1.64% and the joint likelihood of failure to adopt all of the adaptation strategies was 2.92%. Therefore, future policy should focus on towards supporting improved extension service, offer climate related training and information especially to adaptation technologies to increase the farm households experience in adopting different strategies to the negative effects of climate variability which is a global problem of this century.

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