Association between climate variability adaptation practices and household food security in three agro-ecological zones of northwestern Ethiopia

Abstract

Climate variability increasingly threatens smallholder agriculture and food security in sub-Saharan Africa, yet evidence on the comparative effectiveness of adaptation strategies, particularly integrated portfolios, remains limited. This study examines the association between climate variability adaptation practices on household multidimensional food security across three agro-ecological zones in northwestern Ethiopia, using data from 383 randomly selected households. The multinomial endogenous switching regression (MESR) model is applied to control for selection bias arising from both observed and unobserved heterogeneity. Results show that adaptation decisions are significantly associated with by education, farming experience, landholding size, household size, market distance, agro-ecological location, and access to climate information. Estimated effects indicate that most adaptation strategies are associated with statistically significant improvements in multidimensional food security, although the magnitude varies across adaptation portfolios. Crop diversification is associated with higher estimated food-security scores by 25.4 percentage points ( p < 0.01), while the integrated adoption of crop diversification, drought-resistant crops, and short-maturing varieties was associated with the largest estimated gain (31.4 percentage points; p < 0.01). Because relatively few households adopted this full adaptation package, the estimate should be interpreted cautiously. However, effects are not strictly monotonic across all strategy combinations, and some dual-adoption portfolios show weaker or statistically insignificant associations. Heterogeneity analysis suggests that non-adopters could potentially realize larger gains from adaptation than current adopters, indicating substantial unmet adaptive capacity. Overall, integrated adaptation portfolios are associated with stronger food security outcomes than individual strategies, although no formal test of complementarities is conducted. These findings highlight the importance of promoting context-specific, integrated climate-smart agriculture supported by improved climate information systems, extension services, and targeted investments in infrastructure and productive assets to strengthen resilience in climate-vulnerable agrarian systems.