Adaptive Capacity of Rural Farmers Towards Climate Variability: Role of Mobile-enabled Weather Information Systems

Abstract

ABSTRACT The key concern of this study was to explore the extent of farmers perceived adaptive capacity enhancement through mobile-enable weather information systems (here, BAMIS). Four villages of Gangachara upazila under Rangpur district were randomly selected as the locale of the study. Out of 1368 farmers 114 farmers were selected as the sample of this study. Data for this study were collected through personal interview by the researcher herself during February 5 to March 16, 2020 using structured interview schedule and analyzed by multiple regression analysis using SPSS v23. Age, level of education, farming experience, extension contact, duration of training, media ownership, extent of use of information sources towards weather events, content appropriateness and knowledge on weather events were considered as independent variables while farmers’ perceived adaptive capacity towards climate variability was considered as dependent variable of the study. An overwhelming majority (43.9%) of the respondents old aged, 40.4% of the respondents had regular extension media contact about farming activities related to weather events and 68.45% of the respondents had medium farming experience. Among the farmers, all respondents had self-access to feature phone and 99.1% of the respondents had self-access to smart phone. A less than half of the respondents (43.0%) had full access to the Internet while 57.0% had no access to the Internet. Furthermore, 92.1% of the respondent’s were found satisfied with content appropriateness of weather-related events through BAMIS. Farming experience, extension contact, media ownership and content appropriateness had positive and significant contribution to the extent of adaptive capacity towards climatic variability through BAMIS which constitutes 42.6% (R 2 = 0.426) of the variance. This study also noticed that respondents’ extension contact, media ownership and content appropriateness had also positive contribution (at 1% level of significance). Thus, the study concludes with the recommendation to enable favorable environment to promote handheld communication devices for weather related apps (BAMIS / BMD) in receiving weather related information for their farming and livelihoods.