Measuring Livelihood Vulnerability to Climate Extremes: Households Adjacent to Humbo CDM Project Site, Southern Ethiopia

In Ethiopia, Humbo carbon sequestration afforestation and restoration clean development mechanism (A/R CDM) project has managed to restore degraded forest (2728 ha) through strategic replanting and protection and thereby managed to generate revenues from carbon sale. However, the study fulfil research gap in terms of the impact of the intervention on the resilience of households against climate variability. Hence, the study was conducted at Humbo district households adjacent to A/R CDM project area to measure the household livelihood vulnerability to climate variability. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches were employed for the study. The livelihood vulnerability index framed with LVI-IPCC framework was applied through cross-sectional household survey conducted on 139 households that were randomly selected from three representative kebeles. The results indicated that major income sources for the households were categorized into livestock production (29.1%), crop (42.9%), off-farm (17%) and non-farm (42.6%) such as petty trade, and labour. The overall LVI-IPCC showed that 16% of households were highly vulnerable to climate extremes while 54% and 30% of households were categorized as less and moderately vulnerable, respectively. Substantial variation across the kebeles was observed in components, sub-components and three dimensions (adaptive capacity, sensitivity and exposure) of vulnerability. The LVI-IPCC estimated that households in the Abela Longena kebele were highly vulnerable (0.000) to climate variability and change compared to Habicha Bade (-0.035) and Bosa Wanche (-0.046). Therefore, integrating rural development schemes aimed at increasing adaptive capacity and designing site-specific intervention strategies to reduce vulnerability of the communities to climate variability and change is recommended to the range of climate extremes that they experience.

Keywords: CDM; Climate variability; Humbo; Livelihood strategies; Vulnerability index