IJESD 2020 Vol.11(5): 258-262 ISSN: 2010-0264
doi: 10.18178/ijesd.2020.11.5.1259
doi: 10.18178/ijesd.2020.11.5.1259
Smallholder Rice Farmers’ Adaptation Capacity to Climate Change in the Bawku Zone of Ghana
Abdul-Razak Zakaria and Kenichi Matsui
Abstract—This paper assesses smallholder rainfed rice
farmers’ adaptive capacity and strategies to climate change in
the Upper East Region of Ghana. We conducted the
questionnaire survey to understand how these farmers coped
with climate change hazards. Most respondents reported to
have used some adaptation strategies, such as using improved
rice varieties, early planting, field bunding and rice
transplanting. We also found that 68% of the respondents had
medium adaptive capacity with seasonal and unsustainable
alternative income sources. This finding at least partially
explains why off-farm jobs in the area are not available and
why 50% of the respondents had offered farm labor services as
their alternative income source. We further demonstrate that
smallholder rice farmers in the study area were vulnerable to
several socio-economic challenges such as weak asset base and
inadequate institutional and governmental support. These
challenges threatened their ability to
Index Terms—Climate change adaptation, adaptive capacity, rice production, smallholder farmers, Ghana.
Abdul-Razak Zakaria is with the Graduate School of Life and Environmental Science, the University of Tsukuba, Japan (e-mail: s1930335@s.tsukuba.ac.jp).
Kenichi Matsui is with the Faculty of Life and Environmental Sciences, the University of Tsukuba, Japan (e-mail: kenichim@envr.tsukuba.ac.jp).
Index Terms—Climate change adaptation, adaptive capacity, rice production, smallholder farmers, Ghana.
Abdul-Razak Zakaria is with the Graduate School of Life and Environmental Science, the University of Tsukuba, Japan (e-mail: s1930335@s.tsukuba.ac.jp).
Kenichi Matsui is with the Faculty of Life and Environmental Sciences, the University of Tsukuba, Japan (e-mail: kenichim@envr.tsukuba.ac.jp).
Cite: Abdul-Razak Zakaria and Kenichi Matsui, "Smallholder Rice Farmers’ Adaptation Capacity to Climate Change in the Bawku Zone of Ghana," International Journal of Environmental Science and Development vol. 11, no. 5, pp. 258-262, 2020.
Copyright © 2020 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).General Information
- ISSN: 2010-0264 (Print); 2972-3698 (Online)
- Abbreviated Title: Int. J. Environ. Sci. Dev.
- Frequency: Bimonthly
- DOI: 10.18178/IJESD
- Editor-in-Chief: Prof. Richard Haynes
- Managing Editor: Ms. Cherry L. Chen
- Indexing: Scopus (CiteScore 2022: 1.4), Google Scholar, CNKI, ProQuest, EBSCO, etc.
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