Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Climatic Parameters and Farmers’ Perception, Adaptation to the Climate Change in Gazipur Area

Abstract

Bangladesh is the hotspot of climate change whose economic growth depends on the agricultural sectors significantly. To reduce the vulnerability in the agriculture sector, this research firstly focused on the microclimate changes in Gazipur district, then analyzed farmers’ perception on climate change and different types of local adaptation mechanisms which they pursued in the study area. To capture the data from 384 samples, household questionnaire survey and focus group discussion used. To analyze the data descriptive statistics and linear regression model were employed. The results confirmed that temperature of the annual, summer season and rainy season augmented by 0.17850C, 0.4080C, 0.62730C respectively, but in the winter season it decreased by 0.5610C from the year 1968 to 2018. Conversely, annual rainfall declined 619.85 mm followed by summer season 194.28 mm, rainy season 406.15 mm and winter season 21.20 mm from the year of 1963 to 2013 (51 years). It implies that the climate of the Gazipur district has been changed over 51 years. The investigation result more revealed farmers’ level of the knowledge and their consciousness about the environmental change due to climate change are high. Vis-a-Vis temperature increase; there was no deviation between farmers’ opinion and the real data. In contrast, regarding rainfall, there is no resemblance between farmers’ knowledge and annual rainfall data. The major adaptation strategies employed by the majority of farmers were changing seeding, planting and harvesting time (74%), irrigation time (88.28%), using more herbicides (78.90%), chemical medicine (75.26%), organic farming (87.50%), motor for irrigation (82.55%). Besides, growing different types of crops with the main crop (70.05%), cultivated high yielding (52.34%), shorter cycle crops (32.03%), mulching for retaining soil moisture (54.95%), covered crops (61.20%) and planting trees (51.56%). The main constraints farmers faced to adjust with their farming practices in the response of changing climate were lacking of money,credit,savings (89.32%), high cost of irrigation (76.56%), high cost of improved seeds (78.38%), knowledge about different methods of agriculture adaptation to climate change (88.28%), pest attack (96.06%), unreliable weather forecast information (78.38%) and help from the government (96.87%). In conclusion, the research result will be useful at different levels of decision making to develop climate change policies and strategies towards shrinking farmers’ susceptibility for present and future changes.