Assessment of Farmers’ Resilience to Climate – Related Disasters in Oyo State, Nigeria

Abstract

The study assessed farmers’ resilience to climate related disasters in Oyo State, Nigeria. Simple random sampling technique was used to select 153 farmers from the list of those who have previously experienced climate related disaster in the state. Results indicate that 58.8% of the respondents were male, 37.3% did not have formal education, 80.4% were married and 59.4% used family labour. Majority (85.0%) were not aware of agricultural insurance scheme while 49.0% were aware of emergency response scheme of the government. The most available resilience options to farmers were improve variety of seeds (88.2%) and agro technologies (88.2%) while the most frequently experienced climate related disaster were drought (=1.20) and flood (=1.18). Also, drought (=1.38) and flood ( =1.37) were the most severe among the climate related disaster experienced in the study area while respondents had high capacity to mitigate pest infestation (=2.72) and forest fire (= 1.80). Low level of knowledge ( =1.50) and poor response from emergency management of governments (=1.46) were the major constraints to mitigation of climate related disaster in the study area. Significant relationship existed between respondents’ education (χ2=16.34;P=0.001) and their resilience to climate related disaster. Efforts should be made to provide capacity building for farmers on possible ways of mitigating negative effects of climate change in the study area.