Life in the midst of changes in climate conditions: adoption of sustainable land management practices in the Niger basin of Benin

Boris Lokonon, West African Science Service Center on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use

Climate change constitutes a serious challenge for the world. For the structural transformation of African agriculture, African farmers have to adopt strategies to mitigate the adverse impacts of climate change on their activities such as declining agricultural productivity. This paper examines farmer perception of climate change and adoption of sustainable land management practices in the Niger basin of Benin. A variant of the Heckman two-step procedure, which is composed of a univariate probit at the first stage, and a multivariate probit at the second stage was used. The results indicate that there are complementarities between different sustainable land management practices being used by farmers. Results confirm that secure land tenure, distance to nearest market, tractor use, plow use, have heard about climate change and membership of farmers’ organizations are some of the important determinants of perception of climate change and of the adoption of farm-level sustainable land management practices.