The adoption of Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) in Punjab: The Role of the Institutions and Socioeconomic Determinants

Climate change poses a severe threat to agricultural livelihoods due to the increased intensity of environmental shocks and weather variability. Livelihood diversification plays an important role to cope with climate vulnerability and diminishing food insecurity. This study contributes to the literature on identifying the main drivers of the crop, livestock, and off-farm livelihood diversifications, particularly focusing as part of a Climate-Smart Agriculture strategy and its impact on farm household welfare. Data were collected by using a multi-stage sampling technique from face-to-face structured interviews of 420 farmers in three districts located in different agro-ecological zones (AEZs) of Punjab province. We used the Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) model to regress a system of equations comprising of the crop, livestock, and off-farm income-generating livelihood activities. Estimation shows that crop, livestock, and off-farm diversification activities have positive and significant welfare impacts when farm households adopted it as an adaptation strategy to mitigate the climate change impact. Moreover, positive and significant determinants of assets endowment confirm that well-endowed farm households enable more to adopt livelihood diversification comparably than other farm households. Based on the findings, we thus suggest these linkages highlight the policy implications for the institutional interventions aimed at strengthening the most important livelihood diversification drivers, to support improving the household strategic assets endowments. This study will be helpful for the policymakers to raise the greater potential for triggering livelihood diversification to expand climate change resilience.