Climatic Hazards, its Effect and Coping Mechanisms of Farmers of Ada’a Berga District of West Shewa Zone, Oromia, Ethiopia

摘要

The effect of both natural and human activities has overtime caused significant shift in the climate state, creating climate change and thereby impacting the human being through its shocks. This study therefore investigated climatic shocks experienced and its devastating effect in the area. The study examined the local coping mechanisms practiced by farmers with aim of survival from the two agro-ecologies of Ada’a Berga district. Primary data were collected and analyzed from a total of 512 farm households that considered from eight kebeles’. Descriptive statistics and multinomial logit model were used to analyze the collected data. The statistical analysis of the climatic shocks in the eight kebeles’ revealed that drought (ranked as #1), crop disease (ranked as #2), animal disease (ranked as #3), landslide (ranked as #4) and flood (ranked as #5) in the six sampled kebeles’ of lowland agro-ecology, and crop disease (ranked as #1), flood (ranked as #2), landslide (ranked as #3), drought (ranked as #4) and animal disease (ranked as #5) in the two identified kebeles’ of midland agro-ecology. The rank ranged from 1 to 5 indicates its seriousness of climatic shocks on the living of the study community. In the response farmers used various means of coping mechanisms with the aim of surviving disastrous effect posed by climatic shocks. However, the empirical result of MNL model explains that Age (0.008), Education (0.017), Family size (0.000), Wealth status (0.030) and Early warning system (0.007) were potential factors that significantly determined the coping ability of farmers in the study area. Finally, based on the result, the study recommends that any policy that designed to address negative effects of climate change induced hazards should focus on diversifying the means of coping and reduces the determinants that challenge their adaptive capacity.