International Journal of Environmental Science and Development

Abstract—This paper assesses smallholder rainfed rice farmers’ adaptive capacity and strategies to climate change in the Upper East Region of Ghana. We conducted the questionnaire survey to understand how these farmers coped with climate change hazards. Most respondents reported to have used some adaptation strategies, such as using improved rice varieties, early planting, field bunding and rice transplanting. We also found that 68% of the respondents had medium adaptive capacity with seasonal and unsustainable alternative income sources. This finding at least partially explains why off-farm jobs in the area are not available and why 50% of the respondents had offered farm labor services as their alternative income source. We further demonstrate that smallholder rice farmers in the study area were vulnerable to several socio-economic challenges such as weak asset base and inadequate institutional and governmental support. These challenges threatened their ability to

Index Terms—Climate change adaptation, adaptive capacity, rice production, smallholder farmers, Ghana.

Abdul-Razak Zakaria is with the Graduate School of Life and Environmental Science, the University of Tsukuba, Japan (e-mail: s1930335@s.tsukuba.ac.jp).
Kenichi Matsui is with the Faculty of Life and Environmental Sciences, the University of Tsukuba, Japan (e-mail: kenichim@envr.tsukuba.ac.jp).

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Cite: Abdul-Razak Zakaria and Kenichi Matsui, "Smallholder Rice Farmers’ Adaptation Capacity to Climate Change in the Bawku Zone of Ghana," International Journal of Environmental Science and Development vol. 11, no. 5, pp. 258-262, 2020.

Copyright © 2020 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).