Award Winners for Volume 15
Vulnerability Assessment of Agriculture at Different Spatial Scales in Konya, Turkey
Global climate change models project that the Central Anatolia region of Turkey will be adversely affected by climate change and variability. Some parts of the region have already been experiencing various climatic changes in the form of gradual increases in temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, droughts, dust storms, etc. The region is named “breadbasket” and covers 33 percent of the agricultural land of the country. Climatic changes inevitably affect agricultural production in the region; however, the factors determining the vulnerability of the farmers are not yet clearly identified. Vulnerability studies use either top-down or bottom-up approaches to evaluate vulnerability. In this article, we used a multiscale evaluation method of agricultural vulnerability to climatic changes and extremes. Vulnerability at the provincial level is mapped on a theoretical basis, whereas vulnerability at the household level is examined using empirical data collected in a survey guided by provincial-level mapping in Konya. We also provide a new definition of household vulnerability based on statements of the farmers and examine significant drivers of their vulnerability. The results reveal that the number of memberships of agricultural organizations, household size, total number of livestock owned, annual income, and dependency ratio of the household are factors significantly affecting household-level farmer vulnerability.
In this paper, we report a multi-scale approach to evaluate climate change vulnerability in the agriculture sector in a province of Turkey using comparable indicators at district and household levels. The indicator approach has been widely used in estimating the climate change vulnerability of countries, regions, cities, farmers etc. However, the results of macro-level analyses lack further verification with household-level analysis and the household-level analyses are not further generalized to macro scales. The paper investigates if the indicator approach is an effective tool to determine the climate change vulnerability levels in agriculture and whether macro-level vulnerability indicators are successful in explaining the actual vulnerability levels of farmers at the household level. The research design and data analyses are done in a multidisciplinary way as authors have different academic backgrounds, such as sociology and engineering. As a result, we believe that the paper will be of great interest to readers in the areas of climate change vulnerability in the agriculture sector, and we hope the proposed methodology will be applied to different regions or sectors. This paper is relying on some of the results of doctoral research conducted by Melike Kuş. The authors would like to acknowledge Doğa Koruma Merkezi (Nature Conservation Centre) for providing financial support for the household survey of the research and are sincerely grateful to the more than 380 farmers who agreed to participate in this study.
—Helga Rittersberger Tılıç, Melike Kuş, Uğur Murat Leloğlu