Assessing determinants of livelihood vulnerability to climate change impact in rural communities context in arsi and east shewa zones of oromia region, Ethiopia

Year 2025, Volume: 9 Issue: 2, 283 - 295, 26.06.2025

Gerishu Bati Waritu

https://doi.org/10.31015/2025.2.3

Abstract

Livelihoods vulnerability is compounded effect of socio-economic and environmental factors that interact under a set of social systems that can be managed with proper strategic measures. Accordingly, Ethiopia has already adopted various responsive measures to maintain sustainable livelihoods. However, studies reveal that most of the strategies have been designed without adequate information on the vulnerability level and determining factors. This study identified the livelihoods vulnerability status and determinants in context of climate change impacts. Farmers’ perceived vulnerability, ranking technique and IPCC-LVI model were employed to a wide-ranging of primary data collected from 410 farmers sampled randomly from four districts of Arsi and East Shewa zones of Oromia region. The results revealed that the climate structures have been significantly changing over time imposing challenges on livelihoods sustainability, while government has introduced various response measures. In this regard, community level livelihoods vulnerability rating score was 49% and 66.7% in highland and lowland, respectively, indicating more adverse situation under lowland community, relative to highland areas. Additionally, the perceived sensitivity rating score was 45% in highland community and 74% in context of lowland community, while the corresponding perceived community exposure are 54.5% and 77.3% in highland and lowland community. Contrarily, adaptive capacity rating score indicate about average level with slightly small difference that is 53% and 52% for highland and lowland agro-ecology respectively showing moderate level adaptive capacity of the study community to manage prevailing climate change impacts associated risks. These results demonstrate a need to strengthen adequate information on community level livelihoods vulnerability, exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity. Therefore, policy makers should redesign appropriate regional policy, strategy and extension approaches based on well identified community vulnerability. This ensures environmentally suitable rural development in smallholders farming system.

Keywords

Climate , change , Impacts , Livelihoods , Vulnerability , Smallholder and Farmers

Ethical Statement

Peer-review Externally peer-reviewed. Ethical approval This article has been produced based on the data collected for author’s PhD thesis, where the ethical clearance (2019/CAES/050) that approved by Ethics committee of the University of South Africa (UNISA) received for 2020-2021 for first phase and renewed for the duration of 2021-2022 for second round. Declaration of Competing Interests The author declares that there are no recognized competing interests that appeared to influence the work described in this study paper. Data Availability Data will be made available on the request.

Supporting Institution

This article has been developed based on the author’s PhD Thesis at University of South Africa (UNISA) in which the research was conducted under bursary program funded by South African government that arranged to cover only tuition fees and partial research costs.

Thanks

The author is grateful to the community of Arsi and East shewa zones and government staff members working at different structural levels in Oromia Regional State for the kindly assistance rendered in the course of data collection and for giving time from busy schedule for the interviews.

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