Climate Change Perception and Farmers’ Adoption of Sustainable Land Management for Robust Adaptation in Cameroon

The certainty of a changing climate is asserted in the perception of observable changes in rainfall and temperature reported by more than 52% of farm managers in Cameroon’s dry North region and almost 70% in the humid West region. Responding to these observable changes, soil and crop management techniques are adopted to ease climatic stress and insure farms from income shocks and associated vulnerabilities. Farmers were surveyed on their participation in sustainable land management (SLM) programs, and a probit model reveals that the probability of adopting recommended SLM techniques is influenced by land tenure, education, gender, experience and non-farm income. Noting that producers’ adoption of recommended SLM measures is the initial step for medium to long-term adaptation of the productive capacity of their farmland, the Switching Regression Model shows that property rights, access to market, access to extension and adaptation due to farmers’ perception of a changing climate significantly contribute to income security. While this is informative for policy measures required to promote technology adoption, however, participating and employing SLM is a plausible insurance to both current climate variability and long-term climate change.