Adaptive Capacities,Adaptation Strategies And Rice Production Under Climate Change

The development of the agricultural system is gravely challenged by climate change in many developing countries.Climate change is projected to pose dire social and economic impacts in China,particularly on rural farming households who depend on agriculture for their livelihoods,hence adaptation is required to cope with the adverse impacts of climate change on crop productivity.However,adaptation hinges momentously on the adaptive capacity of a concerned system,province,or community to endure the devastating impacts of climate change.This dissertation,using Chengdu as a case study,examined smallholder farmers’ adaptive capacities,adaptation strategies and rice production under climate change.The primary data were purposefully obtained through a household survey with383 smallholder farming households in four districts(Pidu,Qionglai,Xinjin,and Dayi)of Chengdu.The secondary data on rice production,climatic variables and other control variables were sourced from the National Bureau of Statistics of China and Chengdu Bureau of Statistics.This dissertation was broadly divided into three parts that are distinct but connected.The first part used the autoregressive distributed lag(ARDL)model to investigate the impacts of climate change on rice production over the period 2000Q1-2016Q4.The study showed that average rainfall,average temperature,and temperature variability impacted positively on rice production both in the long run and the short run.Rainfall variability and the interaction term of temperature and rainfall impacted negatively and significantly on rice production both in the long run and short run.The results revealed a positive relationship between fertilizer consumption and rice production both in the long run and short run.Energy consumption has a significant positive impact on rice production merely in the short run.The empirical results suggest that climate change is an essential factor explaining rice production in Chengdu.The second part employed the severity index,problem confrontation index,Mann-Kendall test,Sen’s slope estimator,and principal component analysis to assess the smallholder farmers’ perceptions,adaptation constraints,and determinants of adaptive capacity to climate change.It was evident from the results that the farmers perceived climate change to harm rice production.The study showed that most farmers recognized unpredictable rainfall patterns,an increase in temperature and a reduction in precipitation.However,evidence gathered from the climatic data indicated no significant trends in rainfall and temperature in Chengdu over the last two decades on an annual,seasonal,and monthly scale.The majority of the farmers claimed that unpredictable weather conditions,limited farm size,inadequate farm labour,scarce water resources,high cost of farm inputs,and inadequate information on weather conditions had impeded their adoption of climate change adaptive strategies.Other variables such as educational attainment,household size,farm size,farming experience,household income,agricultural extension services,and participation in farm-based organizations were significantly and negatively associated with problem confrontation in climate change adaptation strategies.It can be inferred from the results that farmers’ adaptive capacities to the impacts of the changing climatic conditions in Chengdu are mainly determined by economic resources,physical resources,human resources,information,and technology.The third part provided a new perspective on the assessment of the impacts of adaptive capacities to climate change adaptation strategies on rice output from the perspective of smallholder farmers.The study employed five attributes(knowledge,use,availability,accessibility,and consultation)to quantitatively determine the degree of adaptive capacities to climate change adaptation strategies among smallholder farmers and classified into low,moderate,and high.Next,to assess the impacts of adaptive capacities to climate change adaptation strategies on rice output,the low and high adaptive capacities to climate change adaptation strategies were incorporated into the double logarithmic regression model of Cobb-Douglas production function as dummy variables.The results disclosed that farmers with high adaptive capacity adopted early maturing rice varieties,the use of organic or chemical fertilizers,improved irrigation,farming near water bodies,and mono-cropping to modulate the adverse impacts of climate change.Some farming households were lowly adaptive to the change from farming to nonfarming,change from crop to livestock,integration of trees in farms,and reduction in farm size.On average,smallholder farmers had a moderate adaptive capacity to climate change adaptations in Chengdu.The study further established that rice output was significantly and positively influenced by educational attainment,household size,monthly household income,the number of farm labourers engaged,participation in farmer-based organizations,and agriculture extension service.Smallholder farmers with high adaptive capacity to climate change adaptation strategies obtained more rice output relative to the farmers with low adaptive capacity who derived less rice output.Studies suggest that the understandings of adaptive capacity to climate change are still much in their infancy.This dissertation,therefore,contributes a different argumentative trajectory to the existing literature on climate change by assessing the impacts of adaptive capacities to climate change adaptation strategies on rice output from the perspective of smallholder farmers in the light of the uncertainty around future climate change.Methodologically,this present study demonstrated the sense of building capacity of smallholder farming households amidst climate change and the extent to which their adaptive capacities to climate change adaptation strategies influence rice production in Chengdu.Besides,it made use of principal component analysis in determining the indicators of smallholder farmers’ adaptive capacity to climate change.This methodology was recommended by Ducusin et al.(2019),for further studies on the indicators of future vulnerability assessment to employ principal component analysis(PCA)to omit other indicators which do not show correlation.This current study had filled the lacuna of using principal component analysis in determining the indicators that influence smallholder farmers’ adaptive capacity to climate change.Another innovation of this study was shown by the inclusion of rainfall variability,and temperature variability coupled with the interaction between temperature and rainfall to examine the impacts of climate change on rice production.Previous studies failed to analyse the moderating effect of rainfall on the association between temperature and rice production as well as the joint effect of temperature variability and rainfall variability on rice production.This study has sought to bridge this knowledge gap in the existing literature.The results suggest that supporting farmers to improve their adaptive capacity to climate change adaptation strategies is a means to lessen smallholder farmers’ susceptibility to adverse climate change impacts.To enhance the adaptive ability of farmers to climate change and also sustain and improve rice production,policymakers must put in place policies that seek to train farmers on the effective use of adaptation strategies to assist them to adapt effectively to the climate variability in the study area.This could be done through intensive extension education on available adaptation strategies to empower rice farmers to attain the high adaptive capacity to the changing climatic conditions to compensate them in deriving more rice output.The future study direction of this dissertation must not only concentrate on related factors as captured in this study but expand into understanding the factors that influence the adaptive capacity to climate change among small-scale farmers from a gendered perspective.Also,further studies on examining the adaptation strategies among individual smallholder farmers as well as an analysis of the cost of adaptation to climate change would be fundamental in determining the economically feasible means of reducing the vulnerability of smallholder farmers to adverse impacts of climate change.Lastly,future studies must take into consideration the preliminary outcomes of this study as a benchmark for determining key factors which can affect adaptive capacities to climate change adaptation strategies to develop a more robust understanding of the adaptive behaviours of smallholder farmers.