Weather information reliability and constraints for adaptation: Insights from farmers’ perspectives in East Gojjam zone, Ethiopia

Abstract

Weather information (WI) related reliability problems and constraints are commonly reported factors for farmers’ adaptation decisions to climate-induced impacts in Ethiopia. However, the level of reliability of the WI, kinds of the WI constraints, and how these constraints impede farmers’ adaptation decisions have not systematically been studied. The present study investigated the reliability and constraints of WI from farmers’ perspective in East Gojjam Zone. Three hundred fifty-eight farm households were selected from three woredas through random sampling. Interview surveys, focus group discussions, and key informant interviews were applied to generate quantitative and qualitative datasets. Frequency, mean score, and correlation were employed to analyze the quantitative dataset, while descriptive-interpretative method was used to analyze the qualitative ones. The findings disclosed that farmers in the study area have diverse WI sources though only farmers’ own experiences and development agents were perceived to be reliable sources for them. The correlation coefficient results confirmed that the number of WI sources had significant positive relations with family size, and farmland size, while it had a non-significant negative correlation with the farm experiences of the household heads. The study also identified a range of socioeconomic, demographic and institutional factors, and programming mechanisms and information contents of which the four top that negatively affect farmers’ adaptation decisions were spatial ambiguity, lack of trust, lack of information about the seasonal onset, its end, and its distribution within the season. To guide farmers’ effective adaptation decisions, these constraints in the information contents of the WI have to be resolved.