Abstract:
The impact of climate change involves the degree to which a system is susceptible to and unable to cope with, adverse effects of climate change, including climate variability and extremes. This study is related to climate change, and its major objective is to assess the major impacts of climate change and farmers' adaptation strategies to the climate changes in the case of Menz Keya woreda. This study is descriptive research (such as standard deviation, coefficient of variation, etc) which describes what actually exist in the study area. It evaluated the impact of climate on crops production using regression model, the variability of annual rainfall using Standardized Precipitation Index, and the variability in temperature using Standardized Anomaly Index. Also, it uses mixed approach because of the nature of the data. The finding of the study proved that the annual rainfall and the annual temperature have been decreased and increased respectively. The rain fed yield changes are driven by the variation of precipitation and temperature. As a result of the increment in temperature, harvested water has been affected by evaporation. This change brought significant negative impact on soil fertility, crop productivity, human and animal health, and availability of water and food varieties. Leguminous crops such as pea, bean, and vetch and few types of non-leguminous crops have been highly affected. Consequently, it disrupts the food production system, food security status of households and animal productivity. As a measure to mitigate environmental change related impacts, the communities have, planted native trees, prepared composts and introduced new types wheat seeds (Digalo and Damphin) and Tef (Bunign). To reduce evaporation, former have tried to prepare sheds to curtain the reach of sunlight. It has been also worked to restore the degraded ecosystem through employing forestation and reforestation.
