Socioeconomic assessment of coffee farmers‟ vulnerability to the impacts of climate change in ageyo-setema area, jimma zone, southwestern Ethiopia

Abstract

Despite the fact that climate change affects Ethiopian agriculture, there has been a limited research done on impact assessment. There is a limited availability of socioeconomic assessments of coffee farmers’ vulnerability to those impacts. In respect to this limitation, this study focuses on the socioeconomic assessment of coffee farmers’ vulnerability at the household and kebele level, their perception and experience of past climate-driven events that have happened due to climate change. A sample size of 300 coffee farmers were selected by proportional purposive random sampling method from Setema, Diffo and Ageyo for survey and a total of 20 farmers from each kebele with equal number of male and female were invited to focus group discussion. Descriptive statistics was used to analyze: farmers’ perception and experience on past climate shocks events in the study area. Integrated vulnerability analysis approach was employed to develop indexes. The indicators have been classified into adaptive capacity, exposure and sensitivity to climate change impacts. Then principal component analysis (PCA) was used to construct and compute vulnerability index for each kebele. Households with selected socioeconomic characteristics such as low level of education, limited participation in social safety nets (social-networks), more dependents in the household and old age of the household head are more vulnerable to the impact of climate change. Result from PCA showed that 51% of coffee farmer households were highly vulnerable, 19% households were moderately vulnerable and 30% households were less vulnerable the result from the agro ecology analysis shows that coffee farmer households living in Setema (the highland part) were highly vulnerable, farmers in Ageyo (low land part) were moderately vulnerable and farmers’ in Diffo (middle altitude zone) were less vulnerable. Vulnerability index for the kebeles were -1.07,-0.92 and 1.28 for Setema,Ageyo and Diffo respectively. This is due to difference in the level of adaptive capacity of the households and based on different altitudinal zones. Result from perception of farmers’ and focus group discussion shows that in the study area the temperature is increasing while precipitation is decreasing and there is more erratic rainfall pattern and disease infestation on coffee in the study area which forces the farmers’ to change their agricultural practices. To cope with the impact of climate change vulnerability the adaptive capacity of the farmers needs to be strengthened. Future line work should focus on household by using different indicator models to assess the level of vulnerability of households to the impact of climate change and using time series data of coffee yield with socioeconomic characteristics of the farmers along altitudinal gradient in order to identify which socioeconomic characteristics is affected by climate change and affect yield and make the farmer more vulnerable.