The Effects of Household Wealth on Adoption of Agricultural Related Climate Change Adaptation Strategies in Zambia

Despite increased emphasis targeting climate change adaptation strategies towards the poorer sections of communities, few adoption studies assess the uptake of these practices by these groups in a systematic and comprehensive manner. In this study, we used a combination of participatory rapid approaches and quantitative principal component analysis to determine each household’s wealth status, and to assess the relationship between wealth and the adoption of various agricultural related climate change adaptation strategies. Evidence from a random sample of 1231 households across six districts of Zambia showed that the more well-endowed households than their poorly endowed counter parts, adopted most of the climate change adaptation strategies. The relatively well-endowed households had a high probability of 10.6%, 9.5%, 7.1%, and 5.5% to embrace crop rotation, minimum tillage, fertiliser trees and change crop varieties due to climate change, respectively, than their poorly endowed counter parts. Most, if not all of these strategies require some level of resource investment hence only those households who could afford such resources are most likely to adopt them. The influence of household resource endowment on the uptake of several climate change adaptation strategies call for the subsidising of the relatively poor endowed households to encourage adoption of these strategies among this category of farmers.