Abstract:
Communities’ perception of climate change must be integrated with
research information to improve their adaptive capacity successfully.
Thus, to propose appropriate adaptation options to the specific
localities, understanding the levels of perception of rural communities
to climate change and variability is crucial. This study aims to capture
the rural communities’ perception of climate change and its
determinants in Dejen district, Nile basin of Ethiopia. Cross-sectional
socio-economic and time series climatic data were used. Stratified and
snowball sampling techniques were employed to select a sample of
398 households. Chi-square analysis was carried out at p≤0.05. The
majority (65.7%) of households had information about climate change
before this study survey. Age, farming experience, income, the
number of relatives, access to weather information, access to the
farmer to farmer, and government experts’ extension services had a
significant effect on the majority of climatic variables perception of
households. The households’ perception of climate change was in line
with results of climate data analysis. The chi-square analysis test of
hypothesis shows gender has no significant effect on the perception of
climate change. The implication is that all social groups in the study
area perceived that there are changes in climate
