Perceptions of Climate Change among Natural Resources Management Students at Jimma University, Ethiopia

Climate change is any change from normal condition of the atmosphere. These changes include increase or decrease in temperature, rainfall fluctuations, wind patterns change, melting of snow and others. Increasing of temperature and rainfall fluctuations have been escalating the exposure of the country to drought and environmental problems. The study was conducted in Jimma University College of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine, Department of Natural Resources Management, to examine the perception of students on climate change. Students’ understanding on major environmental problems, main cause of climate change, students’ perception on climate change and the way forward to overcome the problems of climate change were assessed using questionnaire survey which consisted 182 purposively sampled respondents. For data collection open and close ended questionnaire were employed and distributed to students. The collected data were analyzed using Microsoft office excel and Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 20. Descriptive statistics such as frequency and percentage were employed to compute the perception of students on climate change. The outcome of the study indicates that climate change is one of the top environmental problems and 92.9% of the respondents perceived that climate change affects the Ethiopian economy and 87.9% of the respondents agreed that climate change is a real problem of a country, 85.2% agreed that climate change affects human health and 74.7% of the respondents perceived that climate change disturb the ecosystem services. The study suggests that human beings should do something to combat climate change; industrial sectors are supposed to do more to tackle climate change and people awareness are required to bring the attention of the community at grass-roots level to overcome the problem of climate change in Ethiopia.

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