Farmers in rural areas have always been facing climatic variability that can affect their living standard. They have managed to cope with climate change by developing ‘adaptive capacities’. Adaptive capacity is the general ability of systems to adjust to potential damage, to take advantage of opportunities, or to cope with the consequences. It traditionally includes: new farming techniques, livelihood diversification and mobility. By using household surveys, this paper analyses the relationship between poverty and climate change adaptive capacities in Niakhar. We first identify the different coping strategies implemented by households’ members facing climate change. Secondly, we define three objective measures of poverty – productive assets index, consumer index and housing index– and one subjective measure of poverty. By using a conditional score model and famers’ climate-change perceptions as instruments for adaptive capacities, we found no statistically significant association between a 10-year change in objective measures of poverty and adaptive capacities. However, climate change adaptive capacities related to new agricultural techniques have a positive association with subjective poverty, which means that households who apply new farming techniques seem to consider themselves richer than those who do not. This result reveals that climate change adaptive capacities, particularly new farming techniques, lower the likelihood of feeling poor.