Effects of climate shocks on Ethiopian rural households: an integrated livelihood vulnerability approach

Abstract

The rural households engaged in the primary sector are vulnerable to climate shocks. The adaptation strategies are supposed to be locale specific, determined by biophysical and socio-economic factors and adoption is contingent on the results from vulnerability assessments. This study is an assessment of local level vulnerability of three heterogeneous groups of selected rural households in South Gondar zone in Ethiopia’s Amhara region. The study analyses the effects of climate change induced shocks on livelihoods using the LVI-IPCC framework along with an econometric technique to determine factors responsible for variations across households. The study corroborates earlier results that rural households are adversely impacted by climate shocks. The poor non-off-farm diversified rural households are highly vulnerable in comparison to those households adopting an off-farm diversification strategy. Irrigation, improvements in access to water, health and other rural infrastructure are also factors reducing vulnerability.

Keywords:

• climate shock
• vulnerability
• adaptive capacity
• rural household
• Ethiopia
• Integrated Livelihood Vulnerability Approach (LVI-IPCC)

JEL::

• Q54

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 “Low-level equilibrium trap” is a situation in which poor economies are unable to save and invest much, and this in turn results in a very low or stagnant rate of growth in national income.

2 The study looks at rural off-farm diversification in a wider context that consists of all rural non-farm employment and agricultural wage employment on other people’s farms, which is broadly categorized into waged employment and self-employment activities.

3 Agricultural waged employment on other people’s farms, unskilled daily laborers, domestic servants and migrants for work, food-for-work participants are typical examples of low paying waged employment off-farm activities. While collecting and selling firewood, carpentry, basketry, handcrafts or pottery, blacksmith or metal work, repair services, weaving, spinning, leather tanning, local food and drink preparation and petty trade are categorized as low return self-employment activities.

4 High paying waged employment includes skilled laborers (wood house construction, builders/masons and painting, cobblestone construction) and formal international migration for work, while activities such as crop and livestock trading, stone and sand mining and transport services (using small automobiles and pack animals), afforestation, grinding mill are high return self-employment activities in the study area. Low waged and/or self-employment versus high waged and /or self-employment categories are mutually exclusive based on the existing nature of rural households in the study area but there is no exclusivity within each category.

5 The indicator method is based on selecting some indicators from the whole set of potential indicators and then systematically combining the selected indicators, either by giving equal weights or different weights for each indicator to indicate the levels of vulnerability (Deressa, Hassan, and Ringler 2008).

6 Discussed in the methodology section.

7 The study area shown in Figure 2 is based on the administrative classification of zones and districts, as available from www.gadm.org.

8 South Gondar Zone has diverse agro-ecological zones with altitudes ranging from 1,500 m to 4,231 m above sea level. The agro-ecologies are: cold and moist (Wurch), temperate (Dega), sub-tropical (Woina Dega), and warm semi-arid or tropical (Kola) (Getachew 2017; Alemu, Nuppenau, and Boland 2009).

9 Village represents kebelle which is the lowest administrative unit in Ethiopia.

10 Each village administration office has a sampling frame with wealth category as poor, medium (less poor) and affluent (better-off) based on the usual rural life style (living standard) and asset (income) level.