Assessing the vulnerability of farmers, fishermen and herdsmen to climate change: a case study from Nigeria

Abstract

This paper describes a study on the vulnerability of farmers and fishermen to climate change and the conflict arises between farmers and herdsmen, in Nigeria. A random sampling survey was carried out in some selected rural communities where 200 farmers and fishermen were interviewed and discussions with community focus groups to ascertain the level of their understanding of climate change issues. The study observed that the majority of the farmers had a good understanding of the changes in the climate through their personal observation, intervention of some research institutes and discussion in various cooperative society meetings. However, climate change has greatly impacted crop production with more than 50% reduction in produce, but not very much change has occurred to fish production. This study further noted that the respondents are faced with increased variations in rainfall and temperature patterns and are yet to have good adaptive measures to the current and expected changes. This paper has recommended the use of agroforestry programme, or tree cropping system, which is a potential strategy to help farmers reduce their vulnerability to climate-related hazards and sustainable fish farming to minimising the vulnerability of fishermen to climate disasters.