Exploring socio-natural factors of farmers' adaptation: A review on risk awareness and perception towards climate change
Creators: name: Ricart, S.
name: Castelletti, A.
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2021

description: Risk awareness and perception have been linked to different types of behavioural models based on beliefs and concerns about the environment that influence how individuals respond to impacts of climate change (Schlüter et al. 2017). Some authors understand awareness as of the first step before developing any resilience-building process but also as a requirement that must be met during the resilience development process because it drives transformation (Abegaz &amp; Wims 2015, Iturriza et al. 2020). Likewise, risk perception is how individuals receive information or stimuli from their environment, transform it into psychological awareness, and (re)act accordingly (Azocar et al. 2021). Perception varies with the individual’s past experiences and the present sets or attitudes act through values, needs, memories, moods, social circumstances, and expectations (Hasan &amp; Kumar 2020). Knowledge, interest, culture, and many other social processes shape the behaviour of an individual or social group who use the information and tries to influence that particular situation or phenomenon (Akhtar et al. 2019). Farmers’ awareness and perception towards climate change reflect their judgments and may affect their adaptation and mitigation behaviour (Hou et al. 2015). Sulewski &amp; Kłoczko-Gajewska (2014) argued that if farmers are not aware of climate change risks, they will not respond to them. Li et al. (2017) applied path analysis to deepen on causality and inter-relationships between climate variability and farmers’ beliefs, awareness, and adaptation capacity. The obtained results highlighted two main issues. Firstly, the belief in individual vulnerability was found not to directly influence adaptation behaviour. Secondly, belief in climate change risks was heightened by the awareness of more observable climate change phenomena (e.g. extreme weather events and water shortage) but it was not a direct cause of adaptation behaviour. However, as some authors suggested, ‘seeing is not believing’, and even after acknowledging their experience with climatic extremes, many farmers continue to be resistant to the idea of the need to mitigate agricultural contributions to climate change (Houser et al. 2019). In this work, a review of the literature examining farmer awareness and perception towards climate change is reported to identify the main statements and driving factors affecting farmers’ awareness and perception. For example, asking about the statement ‘climate change is occurring or had occurred’, between 50-90% of farmers agreement was obtained, including experiences in which awareness is significant or total (75-100%) (Hundera et al. 2019, Mutandwa et al. 2019, Zhang et al. 2020). Most of the studies also reveal how climate change awareness is mainly based on some observed changes in weather patterns, such as the change in temperature and rainfall patterns with about an 80-98% of agreement (Ado et al. 2019, Voss 2021). Likewise, more than 90% of the farmers thought climate change impacts crop production, with 59% of the respondents asserting that the impact is quite obvious (Guo et al. 2021). Moreover, close to 60-76% of the farmers were aware of climate change because the weather is becoming unpredictable (Chhogyel et al. 2020). According to Le Dang et al. (2014), when farmers believe that higher risks of climate change are threatening their physical health, finance, production, social relationships and psychology, they are more likely to have an intention to adapt to climate change. Furthermore, adaptation intention also increases when farmers perceive greater effectiveness of adaptive measures in general and more agency to conduct adaptive measures in particular. On the contrary, some studies, such as Azadi et al. (2019), concluded how farmers’ beliefs and awareness of climate change had no effects on their adaptation behaviours and risk perception. These authors argued that farmers’ adaptation behaviours might occur without engaging their belief systems about climate causality. Otherwise, the results obtained by De Matos Carlos et al. (2020) demonstrated that there is no direct relation between awareness and perception about the harmful effects of climate change and adaptation; perception only affects adaptation when mediated by belief in the adverse effects of climate change (this result is called by the literature of ‘indirect effect’). In other words, awareness and perception will influence adaptation practices when farmers believe in climate change. 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