Journal of Community Mobilization and Sustainable Development

One of the major challenge of today’s world is climate change. Irrespective of distributive opinion it is happening to all sphere of human life. Climate change has devastating effect on the growing agriculture based Indian economy by its natural catastrophic processes. In this context the major crop of Asia, rice has suffered from severe climate change issues. To cope with this changing situation, the farmers need to have proper knowledge about climate change and its adaptation and mitigation practice. So, the present study is aimed to construct a knowledge test to measure the knowledge level of rice growers on climate change and its adaptation and mitigation practices. To develop the test on knowledge level a pilot study was conducted with reliability score of 0.737 and a high degree of validity. The final study was conducted in Balasore district of Odisha. Administration of knowledge test on climate change to rice growers revealed that 61.66 per cent rice growers come under medium level of knowledge category. Correlation analysis of knowledge level with socioeconomic variable revealed that age (0.271**), education level (0.329**), farming experience (0.240**), annual income (0.693**), operational land holding (0.657**), crops cultivated per year (0.484**), ICT tool ownership (0.293**) and extension orientation (0.706**) of respondents have positive significant relationship with knowledge level at one per cent level of significance. Further stepwise regression analysis revealed that total 62.70 percent variation in the level of knowledge has been explained by extension orientation, annual income and gender of the rice growers. The findings of study suggest that policies and programmes should focus on the above factors for dissemination of proper adaptation and mitigation practices.