Household-level vulnerability and resilience to climate change in wheat producing farmers of Arsi Zone, Ethiopia

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine the status of vulnerability and resilience to climate change and identify factors that affect the status of vulnerability of wheat-producing farmers to climate change in the Arsi Zone. The primary data that were gathered from 422 randomly selected wheat-producing farmers across three districts were used. The vulnerability as expected poverty (VEP) method was used to determine the vulnerability status at the household level, whereas the resilience index measurement approach (RIMA) was used to determine the resilience status. The result of the study pointed out that 60.66% of the sample households were vulnerable to climate change while the remaining 39.34% were not. The sample household’s average resilience index was 0.976. In a similar vein, the absorptive capacity (0.401) was the primary contributor among the resilience components, followed by the adaptive (0.320) and transformative (0.255) capacities. The result of a binary logit model pointed out that households that had participated in off-farm income, had large areas of farmland and owned large numbers of livestock, had frequent contact with extension workers, access to improved wheat varieties and irrigation, lived in highland agroecologies, and participated in social organizations was probably less susceptible to climate change. Hence, to reduce the level of vulnerability, it is advised that policymakers and other development partners who are interested in reducing vulnerability and building resilience to climate change should concentrate on boosting the productivity of land and livestock and consider the agroecological differences while developing climate change adaptation policies.

Keywords

• Vulnerability
• resilience
• climate change
• VEP
• RIMA
• wheat