RURAL HOUSEHOLDS' LIVELIHOODS VULNERABILITY TO CLIMATE CHANGE IN SOUTHWESTERN, NIGERIA

Abstract

The study established the vulnerability of livelihoods of rural households to climate change in Southwestern Nigeria. A multi-stage sampling procedure was used to select respondents. A cluster sampling was used to stratify the agro-ecological zones in Southwestern, Nigeria to two- humid and derived savannah zones. Three States namely, Lagos, Ondo and Oyo were purposively selected. A simple random selection of two local government areas (LGAs) from each gave six LGAs. Also, a simple random selection of five communities each gave thirty communities. Finally, 240 households were obtained from a simple random selection of eight households from each community. Data were collected using a structured interview schedule and in-depth interview with key informants. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics, Livelihood Vulnerability Index (LVI), Chi-Square test, Pearson Product Moment Correlation, ANOVA and t-test. Results show that majority of the respondents were males (81.6%) and married (85.8%). The mean age was 50.31 years. The average household size was 6 persons. About 29.6% had no formal education. Respondents had a mean farm size of 2.8 ha. About 54.8% had crop farming as their primary occupation while 31.8% had animal husbandry as their secondary occupation. More than a quarter (37.6%) of the respondents earn below the lower-middle income (N833.33/day) countries’ poverty line of US$3.20 (N980.64). A little over half (51.1%) of the households had members that had their work domiciled outside the community. About 55.1% had experienced climate change-induced constraint in their livelihood in the past one year. Family was the major source of food (36.0%), credit (33.9%) and labour (22.6%) for households during climate change-induced crisis. Change in sowing date was adopted by 51.0% of the respondents as a strategy to cope with climate change. While the LVI of livelihoods of rural households in the study area was 0.39, the LVI- IPCC (LVI as defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) score obtained was -0.02 and these scores are both indicative of moderate vulnerability but with a tendency to rise. A grand mean of 3.75 was obtained for respondents’ perception to climate change. Only sex (χ2=8.964, p≤0.05) and marital status (χ2=17.962, p≤0.05) of respondents had a significant relationship with the vulnerability of livelihoods to climate change. Age (r = -0.231, p ≤ 0.05), household size (r =-0.191, p≤0.05) and number of years of formal education (r =1.129, p ≤ 0.05) had a significant relationship with the vulnerability of their livelihoods. There was a significant difference in the vulnerability of livelihoods to climate change at p ≤ 0.05 across the states in the study area (F (2, 12) = 7.51, p = 0.001). There was a significant difference between the vulnerability of the livelihoods of female-headed and male-headed households to climate change (p = 0.048). It is evident that respondents’ livelihood assets are more sensitive to the existing climate change hazards occurring in the study area than they can adapt to the impacts. Therefore, government should encourage greater generation and more effective dissemination of location-specific weather forecast to rural households.