Evaluating Adaptive Capacity to Climatic Extremes in Rural Zambia
This thesis uses a case study of Zambia to examine how rural smallholder farmers in developing countries can strengthen their adaptive capacity to weather extremes. After reviewing the literature on how climatic extremes impact welfare in the first chapter, the second chapter uses a systematic review of randomized and non-randomized studies to evaluate the effectiveness of policy interventions in ameliorating the adverse welfare effects of climatic extremes. Taken together, these chapters identify yield losses, consumption deficits, and nutritional deprivation as among the key causal interrelated pathways that are responsible for welfare losses. The second chapter also shows that policy interventions – especially targeted ones – provide far-reaching remediation benefits. The remaining chapters leverage a large household-level panel dataset that provides a comprehensive view of rural agricultural activities to obtain adaptive capacity insights. Particularly, the third chapter leverages a unique quasi-experiment to evaluate the impact of drought exposure on yields and the mitigating effects of Sustainable Land Management Practices (SLMs) using the matched Difference-in-Differences and triple difference estimation strategies respectively. The results show that severe drought exposure results in crop production losses, with evidence of both yield resilience and harm observed among adopters of SLMs. Employing the matched Mundlak Correlated Random Effects model, the fourth chapter exploits geographical disparities in drought exposure conditions to explore whether access to agricultural support and the choice of adaptive strategy influence behavioural responses of drought-exposed households differently vis-à-vis the counterfactual group. The results offer critical insights into the potential effectiveness of agricultural policy components in shaping rural smallholder farmers’ risk-management and risk-coping behavioural responses to climatic variability. Lastly, the final chapter disaggregates the impact of both aggregate and asymmetrical weather shocks across consumption categories to better understand how overall household welfare responds to climatic extremes. The Fixed Effects estimates reveal that weather extremes contribute to considerable welfare costs by adversely impacting consumption and dietary diversity, and that risk-coping strategies provide mitigation benefits, influence consumption realignment, and contribute to higher caloric availability in rural households.
Adaptive Capacity, Aggregate and Asymmetric Shocks, Behavioural Responses, Caloric Availability, Climatic Extremes, Consumption Variability, Crop Production, Drought Exposure, Natural Experiment, Zambia
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