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This study aimed to determine factors that increase resilience and cause smallholder farmers to adapt better to climate change and vulnerability.

In this study, the authors used the vulnerability to resilience model and binary logit model to analyse the factors influencing household decisions to adapt.

Households with increased access to climate information through extension services were likely to have better adaptation abilities. It was also shown that younger farmers were likely to adapt to climate change given their flexibility to adopt new techniques and their access and use of modern information and technology. Larger households were found to have higher probability of adapting as most adaptation strategies are labour intensive. Household’s possession of livestock and access to credit significantly enhanced adaptation. However, households with higher farm income have lesser incentives to adapt to because their current farming practices might already be optimum.

Given that most of the smallholder farmers are vulnerable, such as women-headed households and the elderly, who are labour constrained, there is need for research and development of labour saving technologies to increase resilience to climate change and vulnerability.

These findings underscore the importance of enabling farmer access to information and better technologies which enable them to increase adaptive capacity and resilience.

The purpose of this paper is to assess smallholder farmers’ vulnerability to climate change and variability based on the socioeconomic and biophysical characteristics of Chiredzi District, a region that is susceptible to the adverse effects of climate change and variability.

Vulnerability was assessed using the Vulnerability to Resilience and the Climate Vulnerability and Capacity frameworks.

The major indicators and drivers of vulnerability were identified as droughts, flash floods, poor soil fertility and out-migration leaving female- and child-headed households. From sensitivity analysis, it was shown that different areas within the district considered different biophysical and socioeconomic indicators to climate change and variability. They also considered different vulnerability indicators to influence the decisions for adaptation to climate change and variability.

The results of this study indicate that the area and cropping systems are greatly exposed and are sensitive to climatic change stimuli, as shown by the decline in main cereal grain yield. These results also showed that there is a need to define and map local area vulnerability as a basis to recommend coping and adaptation measures to counter climate change hazards.

This paper aims to explore pathways in which adaptation challenges may occur. Focus is on the barriers to adaptation, challenges to adaptation and maladaptation with reference to smallholder farmers in the Southern African Development Community region.

Bibliometric analysis techniques were used to track the literature on smallholder farmers’ adaptation challenges. Web of Science was the main data source. A total of 41 articles were retained for analysis and exported into Visualization of Similarities Viewer Software where the development of research on the subject, co-occurrence of keywords analysis, top publishers, citations and total link strength was done.

Results indicate that research on smallholder farmers’ adaptation challenges is not new but has gained more consideration post-2020. The main adaptation challenges emanate from perception barriers and constraints based on determinants of adoption, limitations for resilience building and achieving sustainable adaptation as well as contestations around Climate Smart Agriculture technologies.

Effective design of adaptation policies should center on prioritizing the needs of the local people. This would reduce the occurrences of smallholder farmers’ adaptation challenges, promote resilience building and contribute toward achieving sustainable adaptation.

It is equally important to document adaptation challenges. However, adaptation challenges are rarely shared with the same enthusiasm as its successes. This work focuses on the matter with the intention of conscientizing smallholder farmers to reduce the risk of repeating the same adaptation mistakes.