Abstract

Climate change (CC) remains a global concern, negatively impacting food security and human health—particularly through its impacts on climate-smart agriculture. Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) has emerged as an important adaptation and mitigation strategy to address the effects of CC, but its adoption has been low in Nigeria due to limited awareness and knowledge of CSA, among other factors. Thus, this study was conducted to determine snail farmers' willingness to adopt climate-smart agriculture practices in Anambra State. A multistage sampling technique was adopted. The first stage involved the purposive selection of Local Government Areas (LGAs), including Ogbaru, Anambra West, Ihiala, Awka South, Idemili North, and Anaocha. The selection was based on the degree of involvement in snail farming as documented by the Anambra State Agricultural Development Program. At the second stage, three communities were randomly selected from each LGA and in the third stage, random sampling was used to select ten snail farmers per community. A total of thirty farmers were sampled per LGA, totaling a hundred and eighty (180) sampled farmers. A structured questionnaire was then used to collect data on farmers’ Socio-economic characteristics, the willingness to use climate-smart practices by snail farmers and snail farmer’s annual yield. Descriptive and inferential analyses were used. The result revealed that 65% of the respondents were males with a mean age of 39 years. The majority (60.0%) had secondary education, and 70% of respondents had a household size of 1-5 persons. The adaptation methods employed were water conservation (50.0%), agroforestry integration (27.5%), waste management (28.33%) and natural pest control (87.72%). Training, farmers' interest in CSA, and past implementation of CSA are significant at the 1% level. positively and significantly affect willingness to adopt CSA at 5% and 1%, respectively, while the type of climate-smart agriculture adopted negatively affected willingness to adopt CSA—flock size. (P=0.000), water conservation, agroforestry integration, waste management, and natural pest control (P=0.01) had positive and statistically significant effects on yield. The higher the number of snails used for production, the higher the yield. The study recommends training and water conservation as the minimum variables to increase adoption of CSA and, consequently, increase yield.