Farmer adaptation to climate change: A case study from the arid rangelands of Southern Africa

The Karoo region in South Africa experienced drought for half the years between 2012-2019, thus creating natural experimental conditions to examine how the adoption of possible mitigating behaviours impact the performance of privately owned sheep farms. Five adaptations were reviewed using farm level panel data. Prior to the drought, transhumance and low stocking rates were the most common defences but during the current period these practices decreased by 23%. Four other adaptations became more prevalent, including on-and off-farm diversification, adjusting stocking density, improved hardiness of the flock and supplementary feeding. The first two resulted in small changes but the remaining two were more successful. The farmers followed different strategies, and the only way in which adaptations could be aggregated was to cluster farmers according to their degree of adoption of the two most prevalent adaptations, that is, stocking density and feeding strategies. t-tests revealed that farmers using more supplementary feed were significantly more efficient before and during the drought than those that did not. These results are important as they show farmers are adapting to climate change by making marginal changes to their system even if they are not fully aware or even believe the full potential impact of climate change.