Land-use Dynamics And Climate Variability Local Processes And Livelihood Implications On Small-scale Farmers In Anger Watershed Southwestern Ethiopia

The study focuses on the assessment of impacts of global environmental change processes such as climate variability and land-use dynamics on the livelihood of small farm households as emerging challenges facing local communities. Hence, the general objective is to assess the dynamics in rural community’s access to land resources and land use/cover dynamics, the state of climate change in the watershed to explore the effects of these changes in combination or individually on vulnerability situations and adaptation strategies of the smallholder farmers. The remote sense data sources were used for land use land cover (LULC) dynamics detection and analysis from 1976 to 2019. The gridded data of rainfall and temperature were used to analyze the status and trend, and variability of rainfall and temperature. The socioeconomic, and other household data were collected from 335 randomly selected households, group discussants, and officials and experts’ interview. The LULC change detection was made using ArcGIS 10.4 and ERDAS IMAGINE 2015 software packages, and integrated with descriptive, and qualitative analysis of data to assess the structural land use dynamics and local implications. The Mann-Kendall test for trend analysis, and different variability measures were used for rainfall and temperature analysis, while community perceptions were analyzed descriptively and qualitatively. The principal component analysis (PCA) based analysis of variance, measures of difference (T-tests, and Pearson’s linear correlations), and descriptive and qualitative techniques were used for vulnerability analysis. Descriptive statistics and multivariate analysis of variance (One-way MANOVA), and qualitative techniques were used for analysis of household’s adaptation. Observations showed that agricultural land and settlements were increased at the expense of other land cover in the watershed. The condition was severe in the kolla agroecology due to unique historical land use dynamics, besides adversely affecting small-scale farmers’ access to land resources in the area. Increasing trends of temperature, and high variability and insignificant but increasing rainfall trend, with remarkable agroecological differences were observed. Although community’s perceptions in the process and impacts vary across agroecology, unpredictability of rainfall time, concentrations etc. were major challenges resulting multifaceted impacts on the farmers. Household’s vulnerability magnitude ranges from high to moderate in the watershed, while in aggregate, kolla agroecology was more vulnerable than the highland. Social adaptability factors, and sensitivity to land resources were significantly contributed for the vulnerability differences. Although, climate variability was notable, structural land use dynamics was unequivocal stressor deepened the households’ vulnerability in the kolla. Households’ adoptions of the adaptation and coping strategies show significant differences along case studies. Although free ecosystem-based strategies become less practical and have been replaced, the processes were gradual, internal to the community and managed through adaptive learning in the highland, while the situations were toward maladaptive, due to state’s ‘development’ interventions which disrupted free adaptations, and deteriorated adaptive learning of the community in kolla. In general, the thesis signifies the acumens of structural land use analysis for LULC researches, micro-scale agroecology-based climate variability analysis benefit to integrate the knowledge with site specific non-climatic processes to understand local livelihood trajectories, relatively the overweighted impacts of largescale agricultural investments induced structural land use dynamics for household’s vulnerability, and to constrain their inherent adaptation strategies. Future research, and any development policy should comprehend knowledge on, and consider the accounts on local community’s livelihood sensitivity to changes which deny their access to agroecologically provided land resources in the phase of changing climate, recognize simultaneous impacts of such processes in the livelihood studies and policy decisions, and enhance stakeholders’ familiarity and consensus on local environmental and livelihood contexts to achieve win-win relationship among the actors in the watershed

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