Farmers' adaptation behavior in the face of climate change in Khoy Township

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Department of Agricultural Extension and Education, College of Agriculture, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran

2 Department of Water Resources Management, College of Agriculture, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Introduction: Any long-term changes on the weather conditions are called climate change. The most critical environmental threat against the earth planet is the climate changes on these days. In other hand, the climate changes which has increased so fast in these decade has caused the water managers, the water consumers and the all authorities and planners face with serious challenges and there is no clue. It does not seem there is logical way to assume that the climate changes and hydrological conditions are going to remain in the same structure as they have been before. Therefore, the important issue is making a useful plan to avoid and control effects of climate changes while we are facing serious challenges by the impacts of climate. The climate changes has made a bad impact on the agricultural part in the different regions of world, so farmers need to be adapted more with these changes to save their livelihood. This research is done based on understanding how the farmers are adapting with the climate changes by using of the behavioral model in Khoy Township.
Material and methods: The present quantitative research as an applied inquiry which has been done in the descriptive-correlational method in Khoy Township. The statistical population was 25811 households which 380 of them was selected based on Krejcie and Morgan sample size table and stratified random sampling method. The research instrument was a questionnaire which its face and content validity was confirmed by a panel of expert in the field of agricultural extension and education and its reliability was confirmed with Cronbach's alpha (0.72 ≤α ≤0.90) in order. The descriptive and inferential statistics is used for data analyzing.
Results and discussion: The results showed that the level of adapting for the all farmer households is not equal. At the end we will provide the model of the farmer household adapting to the climate change and also useful and effective methods to reduce of the negative effects of climate changes on rural households. Based on the findings the most important effective factors on adapting are keeping the agriculture structure, living standards, social solidarity, using of various strategies for adapting, learning new ways to fight with crisis and keeping the power of decision that have most relation with adapting. On the other, maintaining the mood has less relation with the dependent variable. The independent variables anticipate 87% of the dependent variable's changes.
Conclusion: The results show that households increase their ability to adapt to climate change economically by using different strategies and new crisis response strategies. Evaluating farmers' actions on climate change also shows that most farmers are aware of the effects of the climate change and are able to maintain and improve their livelihood. So we can create a sustainable situation for adaptation to climate change by presenting new techniques to local farmers and updating climate information.

Keywords


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