An assessment of the Climate change adaptive capacity among smallholder farmers in Trans-mara East Sub-county of Narok County, Kenya.

Abstract

Concerted efforts are required to sustain smallholders’ productivity in the face of rising climatic shifts. The present study sought to reveal the smallholders’ experiences in responding to climate change and variability at Kenya’s Trans-Mara East sub-County. Its main objective was to empirically ascertain whether their experiences and response strategies were associated with their socio-economic profiles. Among the key approaches used were surveying the area’s historical data on precipitation and temperatures, covering years 1980 to 2015. This was in addition to the collection of primary data on 100 randomly selected respondents from 22,488 smallholders across the sub-County. The primary data included performances of farm-level crops and livestock, as well as the smallholders’ experiences and actual socio-economic profiles. Guiding these processes was an overall hypothesis which generally negated smallholders’ experiences against their socio-economic profiles, in line with the Protection Motivation Theory. To analyse the data, descriptive and inferential statistics were applied. Specifically, the Spearman’s correlation coefficient (rs) was used to ascertain the level of significance between the key variables under consideration. Mean annual precipitation data indicated little changes for the covered period, though it uncovered a declining trend in 2000-2015, with monthly data indicating huge shifts in the area’s established regimes. Mean annual temperature data had a generally rising trend. These situations were marked by dwindling farm output in 2010-2015. Among the smallholders’ socio-economic profiles, only farm sizes had significant relationships with their perceptions on climate change (rs = 0.396, p ≤ 0.05), compared with other characteristics namely; age, marital status and livelihood streams which did not show any significant relationship. As well, climate change adaptation strategies showed significant levels of association with formal education (rs = 0.216, p ≤ 0.05) and farm sizes (rs = 0.541; n=100; p ≤ 0.05). At individual level, significant relationships were observed between smallholders’ constraints and education levels (rs= -0.495, p ≤ 0.05), range income flows (rs = -0.450, p≤ 0.05), and age (rs = 0.266, p ≤ 0.05). At the institutional and policy level, expensive of agricultural inputs, financial limits, price fluctuations, and derelict transport systems, emerged as the key adaptation constraints. The study, through these results, thus concludes that the smallholding farming communities in the study area have experienced various challenges associated with climate change, with the main ones being on adaptation constraints. The study thus recommends for a need to put in place structured institutional and policy-related responses that can aid the area’s smallholders to adapt to the mounting climatic shifts. It also recommends a need for other studies to explore options of using emerging technologies and other innovative options to enhance smallholders’ adaptation mechanisms.