Livelihood Vulnerability Levels of Smallholder Farmers to Climate Change in Selected Parts of Makueni County, Kenya

Climate Change has been known to be one of the most pressing complexes and perplexing global environmental challenge (FAO, 2010), threatening food security, poverty alleviation, and livelihoods for smallholder farmers. Climate change has led to adverse effect to every region across the globe, with many irreversible changes, such as the rise of CO concentrations in 2 the atmosphere, increase of the global surface temperatures and also the rise of the global mean sea levels (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change –(IPPC), 2021), and therefore, disrupting the global movement towards sustainable development (Harvey et al., 2018). Evidence of experienced climatic changes across the entire globe of extreme events such as heavy precipitation leading to floods, heatwaves, droughts and tropical cyclones has strengthened and are more likely to reach unbearable threshold for agriculture, health and may also lead to adverse effect to natural water cycle (IPPC, 2021). In the recent years, the world has grappled around the effects related to changes of climate in all the main economic areas, including agriculture, which is the mainstay for more than 475 million smallholder farmers across the globe (Harvey et al., 2018). As explained by Donattia et al., 2019), agriculture contributes about 60% of the world’sworkforce, providing about eighty percent of the food for domestic consumption in the third world countries.

The Africa’s Agenda 2063, which was concluded in 2013, recognized change in climate as a major challenge for the continent’sprogress and growth. Africa’seconomy highly depends on agriculture accounts for the majority of livelihoods, therefore, an exposure and vulnerability hotspot for climate change impacts and variability. Decreased crop production coupled with increased temperature and drought pressure, increased pest damage and disease damage, flood effects on food system infrastructure, leading to serious consequences for food security and health are major agricultural threats at the regional cascading to local levels. Promotion of socioeconomic growth mostly in the agronomic sector is one of the promising approaches towards reducing climate related risks, poverty and extreme event impacts throughout the continent (UN, 2020). Kenya has been impacted negatively by climate change due to its nascent economic growth trends. Majority of Kenyan agriculture totally relies on rainfall, with only less than 5% under irrigation, and the sector has suffered from increasing variability in rainfall. Floods and drought which constitute some of the climatic extreme events have negative impacts on the socio-economic development, with devastating consequences on the country’seconomy (Stockholm Institute of Environment, 2009; Government of Kenya – (G.O.K), 2010; G.O.K, 2019). Agricultural activities are the main sources of economic growth, livelihood, food security, foreign construction and job creation, and foreign exchange earnings for the majority of the population of Kenya (KEPSA, 2014; Ochieng et.al., 2016). Demand for food, fuel wood and forest products has increased tremendously over the years, leading to unprecedented environmental degradation. An estimation of over 57% of Kenyan population lives below poverty line (FAO, 2010) while, most of smallholder farmers (70%), basically rely on climate-sensitive economic activities including agriculture (Simotwo et al., 2018; Ylva et.al., 2020), therefore, increasing farmers' vulnerability and affecting the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 13, Target 13.1, that is aimed at strengthening adaptability and resilience so as to enable farmers respond to risks associated to climate change and natural calamities (GOK, 2018). The study aimed to examine how variability as well as change in climate influences smallholder agriculturalists in the study area and how these changes have influenced their livelihood vulnerability. It also sought to assess the current mitigation strategies to changes in climate in order to make recommendations on the appropriate adaptation measures and coping mechanisms. According to Mogelgaard et al. (2018) resilience of development outcomes can be improved by mainstreaming climate adaptation actions into progressive growth plans and strategies, leading to the effective utilization of available natural resources, while avoiding investments that could lead to serious harm.

Hahn and colleagues (2009) developed the Livelihood Vulnerability Index (LVI), based on Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA) which typically emphasize on the five capitals, namely, environmental, financial, social, human and physical built by Conway and Chambers (Minh et al., 2019). The SLA approach has been used successfully within United Nations agencies and other international development organizations for planning and assessing households’ ability to withstand shocks like natural disasters, which include climate change, epidemics and even civil conflicts (Hahn et al., 2009; Minh et al., 2019). SLA to some extent discourses aspects of sensitivity and adaptive capacity to climate change issues, but it is limited to address exposure (Hahn et al., 2009).

The LIV, therefore, describes these previous methods of incorporating the various influences of climate change as well as variables that take the level of exposure to natural disasters, their sensitivity to the impacts associated with changing climate and dynamics of household capacity to cope (Hahn et al., 2009). With such elaborate method, it has become possible for researchers to evaluate livelihoods risks from climate change with increased precision and improved accuracy for better planning and better mitigation and adaptation strategies recommendations (Etwire et al., 2013; Hahn et al., 2009; Minh et al., 2019).

The LIV is easier to compute, its strengths lie in the fact that it predominantly uses primary data, it captures in wide context the susceptibility to droughts, floods, climate change, conflicts and a wide range of other natural disasters (Hahn et al., 2009). It effectively transcends postulated hypothesis inherent in earlier methods in its ability to account existing susceptibility that is critical and more valuable for present and timely planning. Many studies have shown the secondary data hitherto relied upon extensively in the earlier approaches suffered from lack of regular update, hence compromising the quality of findings and proposed strategies and recommendations (Hahn et al., 2009; Etwire et al., 2013).