Climate Change Adaptation Strategies for Agro-pastoralists in Tanzania

Abstract

Climate change is seriously impacting the well-being of rural agro-pastoralists whose main livelihoods depend on rainfed agriculture. This study examined the factors that influence farmers' decisions to climate change adaptation measures. The study sampled 411 agro-pastoralist farmers and used factor analysis to extract correlated and uncorrelated adjustment strategies. These strategies include; Crop diversification, livestock diversification, small scale irrigation, rain-water harvesting and off-farm activities were found to be the adaptation strategies extracted by factor analysis as dependent variables. Results obtained by the study show that the five coefficients of the variables identified were negative while three were positive, suggesting that the propensity (tendency) of adapting a practice is conditioned by whether or not a practice in the subset has been adapted. Moreover, it is clear that in central and northern zones of Tanzania, age and access to communication media are strongly determined the decisions to adaptation strategies to climate change among the agro-pastoralists. Therefore, the paper recommends for designing policies that reflect the differences in ecology among agro-pastoralists.