Determinants and policy implications of farmers' climate adaptation choices in rural Cameroon

The issue of climate change and its related impacts is now a social reality. The paradigm shift today in climate change issues is focused on mitigation and adaptation. Besides mitigation, adaptation is considered as an essential strategy for reducing the severity and cost of climate change impacts given the fact that additional future climate change is considered as being inevitable. In this paper, we analyze household socio-economic determinants of climate change adaptation and their policy implications. A survey of 130 farmers in four farm communities in Cameroon was conducted to capture the determinants of farmers’ adaptation to climate change. We employed the binary Logistic regression model to assess the determinants of climate adaptation. Results reveal that in the midst of climate change, 78.33% of farmers have adopted rainfall-related adaptation while 63.33% have resorted to temperature-related adaptation. Based on the binary logistic regression, access to road, access to non-farm income source, and membership of farmers’ groups were significant determinants for the adoption of temperature-related adaptation options. Furthermore, access to improved seeds was found to be the lone significant determinant for the adoption of rainfall-related adaptation options. All in all, much is required to strengthen farmers’ adaptive capacity and increase the range of adaptation options undertaken. As such, policies geared towards building farmers’ resilience should effectively capture the following tri-factors: provision of access roads linking farm communities to nearby urban centres, upscaling institutional interventions with regards to providing high quality and resistant seeds to farmers, and incentivizing farmers to create or join social groups in order to facilitate adaptation uptake.