Climate change awareness, perceived impacts, and adaptation from farmers’ experience and behavior: a triple-loop review

Abstract

Individuals and communities socially construct risk, and societies with greater risk perception may be more apt to mobilize or adapt to emergent threats like climate change. Increasing climate change awareness is often considered necessary in the first stages of the adaptation process to manage its impacts and reduce overall vulnerability. Since agriculture is affected by climate change in several ways, farmers can provide first-hand observations of climate change impacts and adaptation options. This paper aims to identify the current research trends and set the future research agenda on climate change awareness, perceived impacts, and adaptive capacity from farmers’ experiences and behavior. We analyzed a portfolio of 435 articles collected from WoS and Scopus databases between 2010 and 2020 using bibliometrics. From the original portfolio, we select 108 articles for a more comprehensive and systematic review. Publication trends and content analysis have been employed to identify influential work, delineate the mental structure of farmers’ beliefs and concerns, and identify main research gaps. The comprehensive analysis reported (1) farmers’ socio-demographic characteristics influencing farmers’ perceptions; (2) awareness and changing climate evidence due to human activity; (3) the main perceived effects (rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, and extreme events); (4) the most relevant adaptation measures (crop changing and soil/water conservation techniques); and (5) factors and barriers limiting adaptation (lack of information, credit, and expertness). The review outlines the main gaps and their drivers to help future researchers, managers, and decision-makers to prioritize their actions according to farmers’ concerns and their adaptive capacity to reduce farming vulnerability.

Bridging the gap : Understanding farmer-system dynamics in the transition toward sustainable coffee production in Costa Rica

“…Paradoxically, in our case, a high vulnerability perception resulted in farmers' inaction instead of triggering the adoption, which runs counter to what earlier research has found (Arbuckle et al, 2015). Although counterintuitive, it confirms that heightened awareness of climate change might relate to a reduced sense of perceived vulnerability due to risk normalization (Luís et al, 2018), and consequently, a poor risk appraisal may result in maladaptive responses increasing their vulnerability to the impacts of climate change (Deressa et al, 2009;Ricart et al, 2023). Thus, our study adds to the existing body of literature on climate risk perception that such contextspecific climate risks -i.e., coffee leaf rust disease, droughts, or heavy rainfallrelate heterogeneously within the types of technologies understudy.…”

“…We suggest that a higher perceived risk of the possible consequences of protective behavior may take precedence over the effects of climate threats and coping mechanisms and thus limiting the protective behavior. Moreover, our model broadens the set of explanatory drivers in climate change risk studies (Grothmann & Patt, 2005;Niles et al, 2015;Ricart et al, 2023) and other behavioral models explaining farmers' choices under risks (Bubeck et al, 2012;Joffre et al, 2018;Tabe-Ojong et al, 2020) by showing the relevance of adoption risk perception as a predictor of adoption of new technologies and practices.…”

Adaptation of Agriculture to Climate Change: A Scoping Review

“…To describe the picture in "large strokes", the results identify five groups of the most relevant adaptation measures stimulated by the impacts of climate change. The ASAs in agriculture that can be distinguished at the Local and Region scales are: (i) crop varieties and management, including changes in land use and innovative breeding techniques; (ii) water and soil management, including agronomic techniques; (iii) farmers' education and knowledge transfer; at the Region and Nation scales: (iv) financial schemes, insurance, migration, and culture; (v) agricultural and weather services, R&D, including the development of early warning systems [11,99,138].…”

Targeting farmers’ heterogeneity to enrich climate change adaptation policy design: findings from northern Italy

“…The first two sections focused on exploring farmers and farming characteristics, with 10 and 12 categorical/dummy items each, respectively. These variables were selected based on previous studies like Azadi et al (2019), Zhang et al (2020b), Teshome et al (2021) and Ricart et al (2023) for quota sampling. Then, four 'behavioural' sections were defined to delve into independent variables regarding climate change awareness, perceived impacts, and adaptive capacity.…”

“…Likewise, as stated by Chhetri et al (2019) or Wilson et al (2020), adaptation strategies, whether undertaken independently or collaboratively, can influence farmers' reactions, ranging from making gradual changes to transforming the entire system. This transformation is usually accomplished by using different adaptation strategies at the farm level, considering farmers' heterogeneity (Ricart et al 2023). That is, farmers are nothing but homogeneous (Bartkowski et al 2022); they are a complex and diverse community influenced by different socioeconomic factors and behavioural patterns (Barnes et al 2022).…”