Psychological dimensions of climate change: perceptions, collective efficacy, and responses in Berehet District, north Shoa, Ethiopia

Human behavior is responsible for global climate change. The impact of climate change is worse in poor countries like Ethiopia whose agriculture heavily relies on rainfall. The aim of this research was to assess farmers’ perceptions and their collective and individual response mechanisms to the impacts of climate variability and extremes.A sequential mixed research design was applied to conduct the research. In the first phase, 22 key informants and 32 FGD participants were purposely selected for the qualitative data. Three decades of areal gridded temperature and rainfall data were collected from the National Meteorological Agency. During the second phase, quantitative data were collected from 124 randomly selected farmers through questionnaire. Appropriate qualitative and quantitative data analysis techniques were employed. Accordingly, the study revealed that the district has been experiencing a declining rainfall and increasing temperature. Persistent drought, limited surface and underground water, crop pests, and animal diseases were found to be the main impacts of climate change that harmed agricultural productivity. The traditional causal attribution of climate change to God’s wrath by farmers is decreasing. However, farmers’ collective efficacy to reverse the impact of drought was found to be low. Social loan services, borrowing seeds from relatives, working through joint collaboration (Jegie) have been major indigenous responses. Planting drought resistant crop varieties, rainwater harvesting, destocking, cut and carry livestock feeding, and soil and water conservation measures were the common planned adaptation responses to with stand the impacts of climate variability. Climate variability, especially the recurrent drought events erodes the farmers’ collective efficacy to manage the climate change risk. The introduction of drought resistant crop & livestock varieties, and livelihood diversification intervention could play crucial role to restore their adaptive capacity and confidence.