Impacts of livelihood assets on adaptation strategies in response to climate change: evidence from Pakistan

This article explores the impact of farmers' livelihood assets and adaptation approaches on livelihoods. We proposed a new paradigm for the sustainable livelihoods of smallholders based on the grounded theory, to exploit seven household assets and used mixed methodological approaches of growers' livelihood assets and climatic adaptation strategies based on farmers' livelihood concerns in Sindh province of Pakistan and to better understand smallholder farmers' sustainable livelihoods and applied a partial least square path modeling. Considering central critical paths, psychological assets (PsyA) entail mediational factors into the sustainable livelihoods index. The findings show that the essential support of the livelihood of farmers' social, cultural, economic, and human assets positively impacts sustainable livelihoods, though physical and natural assets depict a nonsignificant impact on SLI. However, human and financial assets show comparatively substantial effects on smallholders' adaptation strategies; consequently, physical, social, and natural assets reveal significant impacts on farmers' livelihoods. The study further indicates that PsyA can, directly and indirectly, boost the human and physical assets and exploit the farmers' sustainable livelihoods index successfully. Lastly, this research proposed policy suggestions for poverty reduction and sustainable livelihoods of small-scale growers.