Impact of climate change on farmer adaptation and tobacco productivity in Temanggung regency

Abstract

Temanggung is one of the largest tobacco producers in Indonesia. To support the production, tobacco farmers initiated how to set proper conditions prior to cultivation. However, there were external factors made tobacco production fluctuations; pest, fungi, and especially climate change. For several years, farmers have struggled by the increase of rainfall caused an impact in pollination process massively. To tackle this, farmers have to conduct adaptation. This research aimed to evaluate how climate change impacted tobacco productivity and farmers’ responses in addressing climate change. The method performed including a qualitative approach using in-depth interviews to observe differences in tobacco productivity, while factors affected farmers’ adaptation estimated by Order Logit Model. The increase in rainfall has impacted negatively to tobacco productivity by 50% on average yearly, which pushed farmers to conduct some adaptations to minimize crop failure risk. The use of adaptation strategies in tobacco cultivation required to be combined with meteorology and climatology, including climate-change information dissemination center. Farmers have been applying the strategies aimed to deduct the impact of climate change, such as (1) improving irrigation channels (47.89%), (2) replacing the input and technological support used by farmers (23.94%), and (3) harvesting earlier / time-mapping cropping (28.17%).

Keywords

• tobacco
• climate change
• adaptation strategies
• tobacco productivity