Navigating Climate Stressors: Social, Gendered, and Mobility-Based Responses in Zambia

Across Zambia’s vast rural landscapes, smallholder farmers are increasingly feeling the effects of climate change. The 2023–2024 El Niño event led to higher temperatures and widespread drought during key months of the growing season, resulting in the failure of more than half the nation’s maize crop. Since maize provides over half the calories consumed by Zambians, this loss pushed an estimated 9 million people into severe food insecurity that persisted through the 2024–2025 growing season.

Zambian farmers are aware of shifting climatic patterns and the toll they take on their crops and livelihoods. Many have implemented adaptation strategies, but adaptation is rarely just a technical decision. It is shaped by unequal access
to land and markets, gendered labor burdens, historical displacement, internal migration, and limited state support in rural areas.
This study draws on qualitative data from 12 gender-specific focus groups (74 participants) and 30 in-depth interviews with farmers, extension agents, policy makers, and researchers conducted between 2022 and 2025 across Zambia’s three major agroecological regions (AERs). Through farmer narratives, we examine how climate change is experienced, what adaptive strategies are being tested or abandoned, and what structural forces encourage or constrain these strategies. We employ a feminist political ecology lens and analyze data through grounded theory and thematic analysis, paying close attention to how
these dynamics vary by gender, tribe, resource access, and geography.