In industrialized societies, techno-optimism is a belief that human ingenuity, through improved science and technology, will ultimately provide remedies to most current and future threats to human well-being, such as diseases, climate change, and poverty. Here we examine (a) whether techno-optimism is found among Midwestern corn and soybean farmers and (b) how this confidence in human ingenuity influences their support for climate change adaptation. By examining data from a survey of nearly 5,000 grain farmers in the Midwestern United States, we found that greater techno-optimism can reduce farmers' support for climate change adaptation and increase their propensity to express a preference to delay adaptation-related actions. This study advances our understanding of how social and cognitive factors influence farmers' attitude toward climate change. Findings from this study can also help extension educators to develop outreach programs that are sensitive to farmers' views about the ability of science and technology to solve climate change-related issues.

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Communities' risk perceptions can influence their abilities to cope with coastal hazards such as hurricanes and coastal flooding. Our study presents an initial effort to examine the relationship between community resilience and risk perception at the county level, through innovative construction of aggregate variables. Utilizing the 2012 Gulf Coast Climate Change Survey merged with historical hurricane data and community resilience indicators, we first apply a spatial statistical model to construct a county-level risk perception indicator based on survey responses. Next, we employ regression to reveal the relationship between contextual hurricane risk factors and community resilience, on one hand, and county-level perceptions of hurricane risks, on the other. Results of this study are directly applicable in the policy-making domain as many hazard mitigation plans and adaptation policies are designed and implemented at the county level. Specifically, two major findings stand out. First, the contextual hurricane risks represented by peak height of storm surge associated with the last hurricane landfall and land area exposed to historical storm surge flooding positively affect county-level risk perceptions.This indicates that hurricanes' another threatwind risksneed to be clearly communicated with the public and fully incorporated into hazard mitigation plans and adaptation policies.Second, two components of community resiliencehigher levels of economic resilience and community capitalare found to lead to heightened perceptions of hurricane risks, which suggests that concerted efforts are needed to raise awareness of hurricane risks among counties with less economic and community capitals.

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Potential climate-change-related impacts to agriculture in the upper Midwest pose serious economic and ecological risks to the U.S. and the global economy. On a local level, farmers are at the forefront of responding to the impacts of climate change. Hence, it is important to understand how farmers and their farm operations may be more or less vulnerable to changes in the climate. A vulnerability index is a tool commonly used by researchers and practitioners to represent the geographical distribution of vulnerability in response to global change. Most vulnerability assessments measure objective adaptive capacity using secondary data collected by governmental agencies. However, other scholarship on human behavior has noted that sociocultural and cognitive factors, such as risk perceptions and perceived capacity, are consequential for modulating people's actual vulnerability. Thus, traditional assessments can potentially overlook people's subjective perceptions of changes in climate and extreme weather events and the extent to which people feel prepared to take necessary steps to cope with and respond to the negative effects of climate change. This article addresses this knowledge gap by: (1) incorporating perceived adaptive capacity into a vulnerability assessment; (2) using spatial smoothing to aggregate individual-level vulnerabilities to the county level; and (3) evaluating the relationships among different dimensions of adaptive capacity to examine whether perceived capacity should be integrated into vulnerability assessments. The result suggests that vulnerability assessments that rely only on objective measures might miss important sociocognitive dimensions of capacity. Vulnerability indices and maps presented in this article can inform engagement strategies for improving environmental sustainability in the region.

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