The research team, led by Idrissa Sawadogo and colleagues, surveyed transhumant pastoralists, sedentary livestock keepers, and agro-pastoralists across twelve villages in the communes of Boudry and Mogtédo. The region sits in the Sudano-Sahelian belt, where mean annual rainfall ranges from 600 to 900 millimeters and temperatures swing between 24.5 and 30.8 degrees Celsius. Households were interviewed in French and in the local Moore and Fulfulde languages, with questions covering household demographics, perceptions of climate change, adaptation practices, and the barriers standing in their way. The average household head was 48 years old, 90 percent of respondents were male, and herds averaged roughly 90 animals, underscoring how deeply livelihoods depend on livestock.

Perceptions of a changing climate differed sharply by livelihood group. Among transhumant herders, 96.12 percent reported rising temperatures and increasingly intense heat, particularly between February and April, while agro-pastoralists were more worried about water: 68.32 percent reported declining rainfall and more frequent droughts. Sedentary keepers were split, with 71.21 percent observing hotter conditions but nearly 29 percent actually reporting increased rainfall. These divergent perceptions matter, the authors argue, because what herders perceive shapes what they do. A herder who sees heat as the enemy invests differently from one who sees drought coming.

Statistical analysis revealed that the pressures bearing down on pastoralists are not independent problems but tightly interlocked ones. A principal component analysis showed that fodder shortage, declining water points, and rising feed costs cluster together on a single dimension, suggesting a common underlying squeeze on resources. A second dimension captured mobility-related disruptions, such as obstructed livestock tracks and falling animal productivity. Correspondence analysis added a social layer: Fulani herders were strongly associated with fodder shortages, livestock diseases, and farmer-herder conflicts, reflecting their dependence on mobility and shared grazing lands, while Mossi households clustered near livestock mortality and declining fodder quality, and Gourmantche herders aligned with reduced productivity, pointing to structural constraints in herd management and market access.

The spatial story is perhaps the most striking. Mapping transhumance networks across Burkina Faso and into Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, and Benin revealed a structured north-south system: Sahelian zones function as departure areas, while the wetter Sudanian zones and coastal countries serve as dry-season destinations. But the map also exposed a troubling pattern. Conflict hotspots concentrate precisely along the transhumance corridors, especially in the agro-pastoral transition zones of central and southern Burkina Faso, where competition for grazing land, water points, and crop residues is fiercest. Road obstructions along key mobility axes compound the risk, turning what was once a fluid ecological strategy into a gauntlet of institutional and security barriers.

When asked why they change their transhumance destinations, herders gave an answer dominated by ecology but increasingly shaped by politics. A remarkable 98.23 percent cited fodder scarcity as the main driver, and 72.5 percent pointed to difficult access to water. Yet 68 percent cited road insecurity and 53.1 percent cited recurrent farmer-herder conflicts, while administrative constraints and high water costs added further friction. The authors interpret this as a structural transformation: the determinants of pastoral mobility, once almost purely climatic, are now increasingly socio-political, meaning that securing corridors requires governance reform as much as rangeland restoration.

To understand who adapts and how, the team employed a multivariate probit model, a statistical framework that jointly estimates eight separate adaptation choices while allowing their unobserved drivers to be correlated. This matters because herders do not pick strategies in isolation; they build portfolios. The model showed that livestock size was the most consistent and positive determinant, significantly boosting adoption of fodder storage, income diversification, feed supplementation, early livestock sales, and transhumance itself. Larger herds, in other words, provide the financial cushion and risk-bearing capacity needed to invest in climate resilience. Education was the second pillar, significantly increasing the likelihood of vaccination, fodder crop production, income diversification, and feed supplementation, reflecting better access to information and innovation. Gender also shaped decisions, while household size showed a limited negative effect, hinting at resource dilution in larger families.

The correlation matrix from the model delivered perhaps the study’s most encouraging insight: adaptation strategies are complementary, not substitutive. Transhumance correlated positively with income diversification (r = 0.399), early livestock sales (r = 0.331), and vaccination (r = 0.311), while fodder storage aligned with income diversification (r = 0.331). Households that move their herds also vaccinate, sell early, and diversify earnings. This portfolio-based risk management suggests that policies promoting a single strategy, such as building boreholes alone, may miss the synergies that make adaptation stick.

Adoption rates varied dramatically across production systems, revealing three distinct adaptation worlds. Preventive vaccination was nearly universal among transhumant herders at 88.30 percent, but feed supplementation told the inverse story: 49.21 percent of transhumant herders used it, compared with 97.32 percent of sedentary herders and 99.12 percent of agro-pastoralists. Fodder storage followed the same divide, practiced by 99.20 percent of sedentary herders but only 38.50 percent of transhumant ones. Fodder crop cultivation was almost absent among transhumant households at 8.15 percent, while transhumance itself was practiced by 100 percent of transhumant herders, 23 percent of agro-pastoralists, and no sedentary keepers. Cluster analysis then grouped households into three vulnerability profiles: those squeezed by water access who rely on long-distance cross-border movement, those losing grazing land who resort to informal grazing in protected areas, and those dominated by farmer-herder conflict amid agricultural expansion.

The policy implications are as concrete as they are urgent. The authors call for the legal protection and restoration of transhumance corridors, the development of strategic water points along pastoral routes, stronger climate and livestock advisory services, and fodder production initiatives suited to Sudano-Sahelian conditions. They also stress that only 21 percent of surveyed households held individual or state-recognized land rights, with most relying on customary arrangements, an insecurity that discourages long-term investment in pasture improvement. With low schooling levels and weak participation in collective organizations, only 11 percent belonged to pastoral groups, many households lack the human and social capital to seize available options. As climate change tightens its grip on the Sahel, the study concludes that protecting mobility, educating herders, and securing resource access are not separate goals but a single, interdependent agenda for keeping millions of livelihoods alive.

Subject of Research: Determinants of pastoral climate change adaptation strategies in West African rangelands

Article Title: Spatial constraints and drivers of pastoral adaptation to climate change in West African rangelands: A multivariate probit analysis

Article References: Sawadogo, I., Bayen, P., Kouassi, F. A., & Worou, O. N. (2026). Spatial constraints and drivers of pastoral adaptation to climate change in West African rangelands: A multivariate probit analysis. Environmental Challenges, 25, Article 101676. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envc.2026.101676

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: pastoralism, transhumance, climate change adaptation, Burkina Faso, Sahel, rangelands, multivariate probit, farmer-herder conflict, livestock mobility, fodder scarcity, water access, land tenure

Climate-smart agriculture, promoted by governments and development agencies worldwide, is a package of farming practices designed to sustainably raise productivity, build resilience to climate shocks and, where possible, reduce greenhouse gas emissions from farming itself. Ghana has even built the approach into national policy through its Climate-Smart Agriculture and Food Security Action Plan. Yet adoption among smallholder farmers remains stubbornly low. Previous research pointed to the heavy investments in land, labour and financial capital that many of these practices demand, but few studies had systematically sorted practices by their dominant resource requirement and then traced how that requirement shapes who adopts what.

Jonathan Atta-Aidoo and Philip Antwi-Agyei, both of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, tackled that gap with a survey of 350 smallholder farmers in seven communities across the North East and Upper East Regions of Ghana, an area within the Sudan Savannah agroecological zone where a single rainy season runs from May or June to September or October. The districts chosen, West Mamprusi Municipality, Bongo District and Bolgatanga Municipality, are highly exposed to droughts and floods and depend heavily on rain-fed farming. Interviews, conducted in the local Gurne and Mumprusi languages between August and September 2021, lasted about 50 minutes each and covered household characteristics, farm features, institutional access, experience of climatic shocks, behavioural measures and the use of twelve distinct climate-smart practices.

The analytical core of the study is a typology. The researchers assigned each of the twelve practices to the single most essential resource without which adoption would be impossible, producing three categories: land-intensive practices that require farmers to expand their cultivated area, labour-intensive practices that demand additional hands, and finance-intensive practices that call for extra capital. The authors acknowledge the limitation of forcing each practice into one box, since many practices carry multiple resource demands, but argue that identifying the binding constraint is what matters for policy.

To model adoption, the team turned to econometric tools built for interdependent decisions. Because farmers can and do adopt practices from several categories at once, a univariate approach would discard information about how choices move together. The multivariate probit model allowed the researchers to estimate the factors driving adoption of each resource-based category simultaneously, while a multivariate ordered probit model, estimated through a composite marginal likelihood approach, captured how deeply farmers engage within each category, from adopting a single practice to adopting three or more. Positive correlations among the error terms across categories revealed that farmers treat the three typologies as complements rather than substitutes, mixing practices to maximise their synergistic effects.

The headline numbers are striking. About 80 percent of surveyed farmers had adopted at least one labour-intensive practice, roughly 73 percent had taken up at least one land-intensive practice, but only around 55 percent had adopted any finance-intensive practice. The depth of adoption tells an even sharper story: roughly 23 percent of farmers had adopted all four labour-intensive practices, compared with about 3 percent for land-intensive practices and less than 1 percent for finance-intensive ones. In other words, farmers in these communities will happily invest sweat, and will often find ways to work more land, but they balk when a practice demands cash.

Gender emerged as a decisive fault line, but only where money was concerned. The study found that gender played no significant role in the adoption of land-intensive or labour-intensive practices, a result that challenges assumptions that women’s limited control over land automatically blocks their uptake of land-hungry techniques. Women, despite shouldering heavy domestic workloads, evidently find ways to supply the labour these practices require. Finance-intensive practices were a different matter: female farmers were about 36 percent less likely to adopt them than their male counterparts, a disparity the authors attribute to women’s weaker control over financial resources. Education partially offset this gap, with women who had completed primary school or more being substantially more likely to invest in capital-hungry practices.

Institutional factors ran through the results like a common thread. Access to extension services raised the likelihood of adopting land-intensive practices by about 81 percent and finance-intensive practices by a similar margin, suggesting that expert advice reduces the perceived risk of committing scarce resources. Access to input markets boosted adoption across all three categories, and secure land tenure increased the odds of adopting labour-intensive practices by about 39 percent, apparently because farmers want assurance that their investments will not be lost before committing extra money to hired labour. Membership in farmer-based organisations helped women in particular, since such groups often organise rotational labour-sharing arrangements that ease the burden of labour-intensive techniques.

Climate shocks shaped behaviour in ways that varied by shock type and by gender. Farmers who had experienced drought were about 52 percent more likely to adopt land-intensive practices and about 67 percent more likely to adopt finance-intensive ones, with the effect especially strong among women, plausibly because technologies such as drip irrigation and drought-tolerant crops promise output even when rain fails. Flooding told the opposite story for some practices: women who had experienced floods were about 51 percent less likely to adopt finance-intensive practices, reflecting risk aversion about losing farm investments, while expanding farmland in flood-prone areas raises the very exposure farmers fear. Intriguingly, subjective norms, the social pressure farmers feel from their communities, reduced male farmers’ likelihood of adopting finance-intensive practices by about 37 percent, indicating that peer pressure can backfire rather than nudge men toward new technologies.

The study’s policy implications are concrete. The authors recommend expanding extension services, potentially through mobile delivery, pursuing land reforms that remove cultural tenure insecurities, and organising agricultural fairs that connect input dealers directly with farmers. Most pointedly, they call for gender-specific interventions, including credit facilities and extension services tailored to women, to close the resource gap that keeps female farmers out of finance-intensive practices. District-level differences also mattered, with farmers in the more urbanised municipalities adopting at higher rates than those in rural Bongo, hinting that infrastructure and market proximity shape who can respond to climate change. As climate projections darken for West Africa, the lesson from northern Ghana is that helping farmers adapt is less about inventing new practices than about matching support to the specific resource, whether land, labour or capital, that each practice demands.

Subject of Research: Determinants of climate-smart agriculture adoption by resource requirement among smallholder farmers in rural Ghana

Article Title: Climate-smart agriculture adoption in rural Ghana: do resource requirements matter?

Article References: Atta-Aidoo, J., & Antwi-Agyei, P. (2025). Climate-smart agriculture adoption in rural Ghana: do resource requirements matter?. BMC Environmental Science, 2(1), Article 4. https://doi.org/10.1186/s44329-025-00018-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s44329-025-00018-6

Keywords: climate-smart agriculture, smallholder farmers, Ghana, Sudan Savannah, gender disparities, land tenure security, extension services, climate shocks, multivariate probit, adoption determinants, food security, resource requirements

The research, published in Discover Agriculture, was led by John Atsu Agbolosoo of IPB University in Indonesia together with Collins Yeboah Asiedu of Ghana Cocoa Board, Dick Chune Midamba and Mary Kwesiga of Gulu University, Stephen Opoku-Mensah of Kumasi Technical University, and Benjamin Sarfo of Akenten Appiah Menka University. The team surveyed 241 smallholder cocoa farmers in the Dodi Papase area of Ghana’s Kadjebi District during the 2023/2024 crop year, drawing participants from Cocoa Health and Extension Division registers of farmers who had already carried out at least one rehabilitation activity. Their central insight is deceptively simple but methodologically consequential: farmers do not treat the four main rehabilitation techniques as mutually exclusive menu items. Instead, they mix, match, and sequence coppicing, phased replanting, planting seedlings under old trees, and complete replanting in ways that reflect their resources, constraints, and risk tolerances.

Previous studies, most of them conducted in Nigeria, typically analyzed rehabilitation decisions one technique at a time, using single-equation logit or probit models that treat each choice as independent. The authors of the new work argue that this approach can produce biased or inefficient estimates because the latent factors driving one decision, such as managerial skill, risk appetite, or informal information networks, often spill over into others. To capture that interdependence, they estimated a multivariate probit model, a framework that models four binary outcomes simultaneously and allows the unobserved error terms to be correlated through a full variance-covariance matrix. A likelihood ratio test of joint independence decisively rejected the null hypothesis, with a chi-squared statistic of 28.33 on six degrees of freedom and a p-value below 0.01, confirming that the four decisions are statistically linked and that the joint model is warranted.

The correlation structure itself proved revealing. The strongest positive association appeared between coppicing and complete replanting, with an estimated correlation coefficient of 0.589, followed by phased replanting and complete replanting at 0.510, both significant at the one percent level. Phased replanting and planting under old trees showed a moderate positive correlation of 0.330. By contrast, the link between planting under old trees and complete replanting, at 0.171, was not statistically significant, hinting that these two strategies may respond to different unobserved drivers. The authors caution that these correlations reflect associations among unobserved determinants rather than causal complementarities, but they nonetheless paint a picture of farmers weighing strategies within a shared decision framework shaped by labor, liquidity, and information.

Adoption patterns were strikingly uneven. Coppicing, the practice of cutting mature trees back to stumps to stimulate fresh shoots while preserving shade cover and soil stability, was the most popular choice, practiced by 58 percent of surveyed farmers. Planting seedlings under aging trees, an interplanting approach that allows households to keep earning from old stands while hybrids mature, followed at 53 percent. Phased replanting, which renews plots section by section to smooth income losses, was used by 44 percent, while complete replanting, the most capital and labor intensive option suitable for severely degraded farms, trailed at 37 percent. Most tellingly, only about 12 percent of farmers adopted all four practices, and just 2 percent adopted none, indicating that selective combinations rather than wholesale adoption define rehabilitation behavior in the region.

The determinants of these choices were far from uniform. Farmer age was positively associated with coppicing, phased replanting, and under-planting, but showed no significant link with complete replanting, suggesting older farmers gravitate toward gradual, lower-cost strategies. Education displayed the opposite pattern in an unexpected direction: it was positively associated with complete replanting but negatively associated with coppicing and under-planting, implying that schooling shapes which technique is chosen rather than simply whether rehabilitation happens. Gender mattered too, with female farmers significantly less likely to adopt phased replanting and under-planting, a pattern the authors interpret as consistent with constraints on land access, labor arrangements, and input distribution that affect women disproportionately. Household composition also proved nuanced. Active household labor, rather than raw household size, was the variable that counted, being positively linked with under-planting and negatively with coppicing.

Institutional and incentive variables told an equally differentiated story. Cooperative membership was strongly and positively associated with coppicing, while access to planting materials from the Cocoa Health and Extension Division was significantly linked only with complete replanting. Record keeping and information access pushed farmers toward complete replanting but away from coppicing, underscoring that information does not uniformly raise adoption but instead steers farmers among alternatives. Training, surprisingly, was negatively associated with phased replanting, under-planting, and complete replanting, a counterintuitive result the authors attribute cautiously to program design or targeting effects that cannot be untangled with cross-sectional data. Farm size was positively associated with phased replanting and under-planting but negatively associated with coppicing and complete replanting, and off-farm income activity correlated positively with three of the four strategies, likely by financing rehabilitation investments while drawing labor away from the most demanding option.

The choice of study region gives these findings added urgency. The Oti Region and neighboring Volta Region have watched official cocoa output collapse, with production dropping by more than 6,000 tonnes over four years and roughly 7,128 tonnes lost to smuggling into Togo between 2020 and 2025. Poor roads to remote farms make official buying centers hard to reach, pushing farmers toward quick illicit payments, and the resulting low recorded volumes starve the area of the fertilizer supplies, extension support, and youth programs that COCOBOD allocates based on tonnage. Unlike Western North, Western South, and Ashanti, which attract the bulk of research attention and intervention funding, Oti remains fertile and suitable for cocoa but largely neglected. The authors argue that understanding rehabilitation behavior in such marginal areas is essential if Ghana’s national cocoa strategy is to extend beyond its traditional heartlands.

The methodological rigor of the study strengthens its conclusions. The multivariate probit specification was chosen over multinomial alternatives because it handles correlated, non-mutually-exclusive binary outcomes while remaining computationally tractable for mid-sized agricultural surveys. Diagnostic checks confirmed the model’s suitability: mean variance inflation factors of 1.83 ruled out multicollinearity, robust standard errors corrected heteroscedasticity detected in the complete replanting and under-planting equations, and normality tests were satisfied for three of the four outcome equations. The Wald chi-squared statistic of 582.14 on 72 degrees of freedom confirmed that the full set of eighteen explanatory variables was jointly significant.

For policymakers at Ghana Cocoa Board and its Cocoa Health and Extension Division, the message is that one-size-fits-all rehabilitation programs are unlikely to match how farmers actually behave. The evidence points toward strategy-specific support: subsidized planting materials for those contemplating full replanting, cooperative-based channels for coppicing, targeted labor and land-access interventions for women, and credit or input schemes that ease the liquidity crunch of capital-intensive options. The authors are careful to note that with cross-sectional data and a sample restricted to farmers who have already rehabilitated, the findings describe associations rather than causal effects, and they call for panel studies, inclusion of non-adopters, and qualitative work to unpack the cultural and gender dynamics beneath the statistics. Still, in a sector where every hectare of diseased, abandoned farmland represents lost income for families and lost foreign exchange for a nation, knowing that farmers choose rehabilitation paths strategically rather than uniformly is a genuinely useful piece of the puzzle.

Subject of Research: Statistical modeling of cocoa farm rehabilitation strategy adoption among smallholder farmers in the Oti Region of Ghana

Article Title: Using a multivariate probit method to model decisions on cocoa farm rehabilitation in Ghana

Article References: Agbolosoo, J. A., Asiedu, C. Y., Midamba, D. C., Opoku-Mensah, S., Sarfo, B., & Kwesiga, M. (2026). Using a multivariate probit method to model decisions on cocoa farm rehabilitation in Ghana. Discover Agriculture, 4(1), Article 283. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44279-026-00765-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44279-026-00765-3

Keywords: cocoa, Ghana, farm rehabilitation, multivariate probit, smallholder farmers, coppicing, replanting, CSSVD, agricultural economics, technology adoption, COCOBOD, Oti Region