Assessing the effects of climate change on peri-urban farming in Kampala district, Uganda

Abstract

Agriculture is greatly vulnerable to the effects of the changing climate because it relies on its elements such as precipitation, temperature, wind speed and direction, humidity among others. The main objective of this study was to assess the effects of climate change on Peri-urban farming activities in Kampala district, Uganda. The study adopted a case study methodology in which structured questionnaires were administered to 95 farmers using a simple random sampling technique and data on the demographic and socio-economic characteristics of the farmers, their agricultural practices, knowledge of, vulnerability to and adaptation to climate change was obtained. This revealed that out of the 95 respondents, 73.7% were male and 26.3% were female while the ages of the respondents were within the working ages ranging from 20-79 years old with the highest number of respondents being in the age group between 20-49 years old and the least being between 50-79 years old. 66.3% of the respondents were married and the rest of the respondents were either single, divorced or widowed. The study also revealed that while 4.2% of the respondents had no formal education, 18.9% had attended primary school, 38.9% had attended secondary education and 28.4% had some form of tertiary education which implied that majority of the peri-urban famers in Kampala were educated and could easily undertake adaptation and mitigation measures against climate change. The study revealed that indeed Climate in Wakiso district has been changing rapidly as evidenced by the results and the changes have been in the form of increasing temperatures which resulted into the drying up of crops, erratic rainfall, shortening of the March, April and May (MAM) growing season, lengthening of the September, October, November and early December (SOND) growing season. In addition, the erratic rainfall patterns lead to the destruction of crops such as, leafy vegetables, maize etc. as they got washed away by running water and livestock especially pigs, cattle and goats usually got fever during periods with increased rainfall and this affected the agricultural yields. When asked if they were engaging in any adaptation strategies against the impacts of climate change, 67.9% of the farmers were engaged while 32.1% were not engaged in any adaptation strategy. However, while some farmers believed that nothing could be done about the problems faced, inadequate funds and lack of agricultural extension information were some of the factors limiting the farmers from undertaking any adaptation and mitigation strategies. It was concluded that the farmers exhibited innovative adaptation choosing to engage in mixed cropping, carrying out mulching, using pesticides, carrying out crop diversification, growing drought tolerant crops, harvesting both ground and roof water, changing planting dates among others in order to cope with the challenges linked to climate change on their peri-urban activities.