ABSTRACT
The research interrogated and mapped the effectiveness of rural farmers adaptation strategies to climate change-induced herdsmen conflict in Esanland, Edo State. It used properly-ordered questionnaire recovered from 275 rural farmers chosen from five rural communities across the five local government areas (LGAs) in Esanland via multistage, purposive and simple random sampling techniques. Descriptive and inferential statistics, Likert’s scale, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and GID-based choropleth mapping were deployed in data analyses, hypotheses testing, presentation and discussion. The study found that majority of the respondents (59.1%) were female, 54.1% were indigenous farmers, modal household size was 9 – 12 persons (52.3%), 49.5 % earned N21, 000.00 – N40, 000.00 monthly while 59.1% engaged in both crop production and animal husbandry. Besides, deliberate abandonment of cattle to wander and destroy crops with weighted mean score(WMS) of 4.27 appeared asthe most perceived prime cause of conflict between rural farmers and Fulani herdsmen in Esanland. Also, the most effective adaptation strategy (AS) was forming local vigilante to tackle the issue (WMS = 3.09); loss of lives and properties including houses, farming tools and machinery (WMS = 3.24) emerged as the most alleged effect of herdsmen attacks on farmers; while forming local vigilante to tackle the issue (WMS = 3.09), appeared as the most effective AS in the whole in Esanland. Eight cartographic maps also showed marked spatial variations with forming local vigilante to tackle the issue, evicting them (herdsmen) from the community and reporting to police/law enforcement authority for action being highly effective in Igueben LGA. The study concluded that the livelihood of the farmers was negatively impacted by herdmen/farmers clashes. Hence, we recommended that the government should ban open grazing while putting in place mechanisms to amicably resolve contentious issues between both pairs of agriculturalist.
Keywords: Conflict, climate change, herdsmen, rural farmers, GIS, Esanland
