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Climate Change Impacts, Awareness and Perception of Africa Rural Farming Communities

Obinna Ibeabuchi K, Thomas T, Jenkins RE, Phillips MR and Komali Kantamaneni

The Nigerian agricultural sector is threatened by changing weather patterns that has been shown to have been influenced by climate change. This work investigates how environmental forcing influenced crop productivity over a 30-year period in Enugu State, Nigeria. Environmental components such as, precipitation, humidity and extreme temperatures were directly compared with annual crop yield variations of the key staple food crops. Regression models constructed around the Environmental forcing data showed increasing temporal trends in all assess areas, with R2 values that ranged between 1% and 23%. While, similar models related to crop yield also identified increasing trend in most crops, an important exception being Yam and Melon with R2 values ranging between 4% and 70%. Fertilizer use dramatically increased during the same period, but no correlation could be found with overall crop yield. Pearson correlation matrices were mostly positive between environmental forcing with crop yield but highlighted that Yam production was negatively influenced by increasing precipitation and humidity will precipitation was positively correlated with melon yield. A study conducted using questionnaires assessed the farming communities knowledge, awareness and perception of climate change (n=227). Result show that 61% of respondent are experiencing climatic impacts, while 63% are concerned of potential effects. Further, 55% believe that it is already too late to do anything to mitigate against likely consequences. In terms of knowledge and information sources, most farmers questioned (64%) sources their information from the media. This poses challenges for more robust scientific methods and dissemination of that data, something that needs to be considered by local, regional and international government and policy makers. Questionnaire evaluations showed that the majority of Nigerian farmers were fully aware of climate change and its impacts, with most complaining that due to higher costs there was little or nothing they could do to address the issues. Furthermore, 64% of Nigerian farmers trusted information received from mass media, while the majority attributed climate change to anthropogenic factors (41%). Results showed that most farmers were more concerned about increasing rainfall and drought than other environmental issues.