Linking climate projections with farmer perspectives to inform agricultural adaptation in northern Tanzania

While there is growing evidence about how African farmers are adapting to climate change, there remains a lack of research highlighting direct linkages between future climate scenarios, impacts on agriculture, and viable adaptation strategies. To address this gap, our research objectives are to understand how farmers in Tanzania perceive (1) climate change-impacts, (2) current adaptation strategies and future adaptation options given climate scenarios. First, we modeled future climate scenarios with a focus on temperature and precipitation. Second, we directly integrated these scenarios into a survey of 125 farmers; eliciting crop-specific concerns and targeted adaptation options given future climate scenarios. Third, we conducted 12 qualitative farmer interviews to interpret the survey findings. Key study findings highlighted farmer concerns about high wind events, as well as excessive precipitation and drought. However, farmer concerns about future climate scenarios varied by crop type, with some impacts perceived as beneficial. Overall, 73.5% of survey respondents perceived not having implemented any climate change-specific adaptation strategies, and interviewees highlighted a lack of climate services, training, and extension staff as a major adaptation barrier. In the future, about 30% of respondents said they would like to implement soil and water conservation practices, such as berms and terraces, to avoid soil erosion during extreme precipitation events. Our findings suggest that increased access to context-specific climate information services, combined with agricultural extension programs, may have practical implications for effective, informed adaptation responses. Our study also provides an example of integrating climate modeling and social science research methods. Practical implications In this study, we integrate climate projections into an analysis of climate change impacts and adaptation options for farmers in Tanzania. In these efforts, we used climate projections of increased temperature and precipitation as a scenario for future climate conditions, and used these climate scenarios in a survey of 125 farmers to ask which crops they would be concerned about, as well as adaptation options they would want to pursue. We then followed up with qualitative interviews of 12 farmers to better contextualize the survey results and understand adaptation challenges. This mixed-methods approach helped us to directly link future climate scenarios with farmer concerns about specific crops, understand perceptions of adaptation options, as well as identify climate information, adaptation knowledge, and technical assistance as major adaptation challenges. Our methodological approach offers an example for how to integrate climate information with stakeholder knowledge to support climate-resilient decision-making in other agricultural regions, ensuring the findings provide useful information that may be actionable for policymakers, extension services, and practitioners working at the climate–agriculture interface. In our study, we identify three major results with practical and policy implications. First, we find that farmers' concerns for their crops based on future climate scenarios was nuanced, and varied by crop type. For example, we find that given increased precipitation, farmers were concerned for crops that can easily rot if it rains too much like beans and tomatoes, while they viewed increased precipitation as potentially beneficial to other crops including tree crops and some livestock species. Second, we find that most farmers perceive that they have yet to adopt any climate change adaptation strategies. During our interviews this lack of perceived adaptation was attributed to uncertainty about future weather and climate patterns, a lack of climate information services, education, and training about adaptation strategies, as well as limited access to agricultural extension agents and other trained experts. However, despite a lack of current adaptation, our results highlight that given future climate scenarios many would like to adopt soil and water conservation strategies like building berms or terraces. Lastly, given an increased likelihood of extreme precipitation farmers recognized the increasing importance of berms and terraces, as well as tree planting, to avoid the dangerous impacts of extreme precipitation in the future. These results are timely given the expected climate change impacts of increased rainfall and changes in the onset of the rainy season. Further, the significance of this research stems from several key advancements in understanding how farmers perceive the impacts of specific weather and climate events on particular crops. Our approach aims to provide a nuanced understanding about impacts on specific crops, and perceived adaptation strategies to combat specific future climate scenarios. Further, we focus on extreme precipitation and center part of our analysis on a recent extreme precipitation event that led to severe localized flooding. Generally, flooding in agricultural communities has been understudied in Africa ( Reed et al., 2022 ), and our study provides empirical evidence about impacts and adaptation strategies, as well as challenges in the adoption of soil and water conservation strategies. Across Africa, it is predicted that from 2009 to 2020, 12% of food insecure households had their food insecurity worsened by flooding ( Reed et al., 2022 ), and our study provides specific information on what adaptation farmers prefer and the challenges they face in their adoption. This research has policy and practice relevance through its identification of both farmer adaptation strategies and perceived barriers to their broader implementation. Our study findings provide useful information for improving extension activities and resilience programs. Survey results identtify agricultural extension as a critical need in the study context, and increased access to agricultural extension may be combined with increased access to climate and weather information for more nuanced, context-specific adaptation. Increased access to climate and weather information services may enhance climate literacy throughout Africa, a topic that remains understudied in the global south ( Simpson et al., 2021 ).