Influence of socioeconomic and socio-political status on climate-change adaptive capacity of farmers in the Gaza Strip - Palestine

Climate change has become a pressing concern of scientific community in recent decades. The Gaza Strip, and Palestinian territories generally, started in the last decade to touch manifestations of climate change, most apparently in agriculture. Furthermore, the Gaza Strip has been suffering from poor socioeconomic situation resulting from political turbulences since 2006. Both climate change effects and declining political and economic situations have reflected on farmers’ adaptive capacity to climate change. This study investigates climate change components that might have the highest appearance and greatest influence on agriculture in the Gaza Strip. The study also measures the influence of socioeconomic situation (certain dimensions such as education, disability, family monthly income, and land ownership) on Gazan farmers’ adaptive capacity to climate change. Socio-political influence in the same vein is also discussed, with concentration on dimensions such as decentralization of water resources, armed conflict, satisfaction with laws and regulations, and female empowerment. Different research tools have been used in this research, namely: desk research (investigating climatology history based on Climate Data Store records), focus groups, interviews and survey. The study revealed that heat rise, and rainfall fluctuation and scarcity have been steadily growing in the region during the last decades. This result was confirmed in focus groups by farmers who emphasized on the negative effects of these changes on the quantity and quality of their crops in the last decade. Survey showed that the adaptive capacity to climate changes (especially heat rise, and rainfall fluctuation and scarcity) of farmers in the Gaza Strip is moderate (close to low) with relative weight of 63.2%. Upon survey results, the following socioeconomic factors are seen as statistically significant in their influence on adaptive capacity of farmers in Gaza: governorate where a farmer lives and works, education level, number of sessions, workshops, or trainings a farmer attended on climate change, years of experience in agriculture, and family monthly income. Regarding socio-political status, the following factors are seen as statistically significant in their influence on adaptive capacity of farmers in Gaza: drinking water quality in house, water source for irrigation, distance between land and irrigation source, the extent of accepting regulations and laws organizing agriculture sector, distance between farm and Israeli fence ‘no-go zone’, and percentage of working females in farm.