Impact of climate-smart agriculture adoption on food security and multidimensional poverty of rural farm households in the Central Rift Valley of Ethiopia

Abstract

Background Climate change has perverse effects on the natural resource base and agricultural productivity, negatively affecting the well-being of households and communities. There are various attempts by the government and NGOs to promote climate-smart agricultural (CSA) practices to help farmers adapt to and mitigate these negative impacts. This study aimed to identify CSA practices widely adopted in the study area and examined their impacts on rural farm households’ food security and multidimensional poverty. A three-stage proportional to size sampling procedure was followed to select four districts out of nine districts, and 278 households were randomly selected from two kebeles from each district. A cross-sectional data of the 2020–2021 cropping season were collected using a structured and pretested survey questionnaire. The food consumption score, dietary diversity score, food insecurity experience scale, and multidimensional poverty index, constructed out of 9 indicators, were used to assess households’ food security and poverty status, respectively. A multinomial endogenous switching regression model was used to assess average treatment effects on these outcome indicators. Results Widely adopted CSA practices are conservation agriculture, soil fertility management, crop diversification, and small-scale irrigation. The results illustrated that adopter households on average showed more food consumption score, dietary diversity score, and less food insecurity experience scale than non-adopters. The results also showed that CSA adopter households, on average, have a low deprivation score in multidimensional poverty than non-adopter households. Accelerating wider adoption of CSA through up-scaling incentives is quite important. Conclusion This study showed that CSA adoption improves households’ food security and reduces multidimensional poverty. We conclude that up-scaling of CSA practices is important for contributing to the achievement of SDG1, SDG2 and SDG13 targets.

Climate variability, agricultural technologies adoption, and productivity in rural Nigeria: a plot-level analysis

“…This was done by merging the household and plot-level GPS coordinates with the Africa Rainfall Climatology version 2 (ARC2) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) database. 2 Daily time series rainfall and temperature data were extracted for the period 1983-2017. Focusing on the planting season months (March-June), coefficient of variation of temperature, rainfall, and growing degree days (GDD) and average rainfall shortfall were generated and included as additional covariates in the adoption and intensity of adoption models.…”

“…There are a number of theoretical and empirical studies on the adoption of SAPs [2,10,14,17,26,37,46]. There are equally a few recent studies in this area focusing specifically on Nigeria [3,6,28,40] and others on agricultural productivity [9,38].…”

Impact of climate smart agriculture on households’ resilience and vulnerability: An example from Central Rift Valley, Ethiopia

“…A detailed description of sampling procedure and sample size determination of the study is found in Ali et al. (2022).…”

“…Well‐structured and pretested questionnaire was used for the data collection. A complete description of types of data and method of data collection is presented in (Ali et al., 2022).…”

Climate Change and Its Impact on Food Security

“…security, measured in terms of food consumption score and dietary diversity score. Moreover, CSA can raise food security by raising crop productivity and reducing the risk of crop failure by mitigating the adverse impacts of climate change"[16].…”