Climatic extremes’ resilient livelihoods of rural households in the Eastern Ethiopia

Abstract Climate change is affirmed as a major challenge to global food security in the twenty-first century and a threat to availability of adequate food for the population. This study was conducted to analyze rural households’ vulnerability to climatic extremes, and their resilience capacities in the eastern Ethiopia. The study employed both quantitative and qualitative methods of data, and analysis to achieve the objectives. While 397 sample households were randomly selected for household survey, key informants and focus group discussion participants were purposively selected. To analyze the quantitative data, both descriptive and inferential statistics were employed while thematic content analysis was employed to analyze the qualitative data. Rainfall variability, increase in local temperature, frequent drought, irregularity in rainfall, and pest infestation were identified as the key climatic extremes in the study area. The findings of the study asserted that rural local households in the study area have very high vulnerability to climatic extremes underpinned by their dependence on rain-fed farming. Reduction in crop yield (93%), and decline in production and productivity of livestock (91%) were confirmed as the major impacts of climatic extremes in the study area. Contrary to very high vulnerability to climatic vulnerability, local farming households’ resilience capacities were confirmed to be very poor. Moreover, the overall resilience capacity index was 0.44, which is below the minimum threshold and underpinned by low absorptive (0.45), low adaptive (0.47), and low transformative (0.4) capacity of farmers. Furthermore, the indexes derived from the five resilience building blocks imply that the level of household resilience is still poor (0.47). The very high vulnerability to extreme climate conditions and the very low livelihood resilience of rural farmers requires integrated strategies to reduce vulnerability and enhance livelihood resilience by governmental and non-governmental organizations. More importantly, it is worth to initiate rural livelihoods diversification and sustainable natural resource conservation, and management strategies. Above all, it is worth to integrate climate-resilient social protection programs into rural poverty reduction policies at national, regional, and local levels to reduce vulnerability, and enhance resilience of rural households in the study area.