This study has been done with the aim of developing and validating a perceptual scale for small‐scale farmers in arid regions and also redirecting interventions towards sustainability; it was conducted in the two qualitative and quantitative phases. In the scale validation process, principal component analysis was employed to identify the latent dimensions of farmers' perceptions of climate change. The results showed that the scale of farmers' perceptions of climate change has five latent dimensions including “awareness and knowledge,” “ascription of responsibility,” “forgetfulness and optimism about the future,” “perceived risk,” and “human agency.” The results of model validation revealed that all fitness indices are at a suitable level, and this scale might be used by climate change social interventions for sustaining agricultural activities, in water‐scarce areas. Given that forgetfulness and optimism are due to the weakness of farmers' episodic memory, it was recommended that climate change social interventions be focused on improving episodic memory using episodic future thinking.