Towards environmental sustainability: The role of certification in the adoption of climate-smart agricultural practices among Ghanaian mango farmers

Abstract

The role of market interventions like certification in promoting climate action has received little attention in policy and academic circles. This study used a multivariate probit model (MVP) to analyze the factors that influence farmers’ adoption of multiple climate-smart agriculture (CSA) practices. An endogenous treatment effects (eteffects) regression was used to estimate the impact of certification on the adoption of different CSA practices. The study found that age, education, farm size, access to extension services and storage facilities influenced the adoption of different CSA practices. After accounting for endogeneity, we found that the adoption of certification reduces the likelihood that farmers will use inorganic fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides by about 50, 38 and 23 percentage points, respectively. We conclude that certification has the potential to reduce the adoption of agronomic practices that contribute to climate change. Our findings suggest that government, policymakers, the private sector and development partners should make efforts to enhance the adoption of certification. This can be done by enhancing access to credit facilities, extension services and high-value markets.

Keywords:

• Climate-smart agriculture
• Ghana
• mango farmers
• policy
• sustainability

Competing Interests

The authors declares no competing interests.

Acknowledgements

This article is an output of a Thomas Sankara scholarship from the Global Partnership Network (GPN) from the University of Kassel, which is part of the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) program “exceed” and is supported by DAAD and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and in cooperation with the University of Cape Coast, Ghana.

Data availability

Data available upon reasonable request.

Disclosure statement

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