Awareness and Perception of Arbaminch Town Residents about Climate Change: A Cross Sectional Study

Abstract

Climate change has appeared to be one of the most devastating environmental threats in the current century. Assessing the awareness of the general population is an important measure to develop mitigation activities. The study aimed to investigate the awareness of communities for climate change and to analyze role of urban agriculture for climate resilience. The primary data was collected via survey research strategy through structured questionnaire. A cross-sectional survey was conducted in Arbaminch town. A pre-tested questionnaire was used in data collection to evaluate group differences for dichotomous variables. Logistic regression was also used to determine the strength of the association between factors. From the study, 87.2% respondents said they know about climate change and the rest 12.8 % of respondents said they don't know about Climate change. Out of the total respondents 87.2%, 70.7%, 63.4%, and 28% of them get information about climate change from media, family and friend, public meeting and lecture/ seminar respectively. Other sources of information accounted about 13.4% of the respondents' source of information. There was significant association between respondent's age, education level and occupation with awareness about climate change at the 5 % significant level. Similarly, respondent's age, education level and occupation were also statistically significant with the perception of respondents regarding the importance of urban agriculture for climate change intervention. Therefore, policies and intervention programs aimed at promoting household level climate change awareness needs to be provided through different alternatives. Moreover, promoting urban agriculture will be important as climate resilience option.