wanting to avoid personal responsibility for negative outcomes will avoid making new choices. By contrast, policy makers can gain personal credit for avoiding a negative outcome, but only if they take action. If farmers survive the next flood because they were resettled, then the policy maker can claim credit. The policy maker who decides not to resettle people will be criticized in years of flood, and yet will get no credit for helping farmers in years where no flood occurred. They will be most sensitive to the negative consequences of doing nothing.

Second, we hypothesize that farmers and policy makers will view probabilities differently. Policy makers will likely have seen gripping images in the media, especially on television, of people suffering from catastrophes. They will focus on these images of farmers stranded in treetops. Most farmers were not personally stranded in a treetop; they were left homeless, but managed to escape the floodplain before their own lives were threatened. The representativeness heuristic could also play a role. For many policy makers, the Limpopo River floodplain is a place defined by flood risk, and flood risk alone, just as San Francisco is for many people defined by earthquake risks. For the people living there, however, life in the floodplain is defined by many more factors than climate risks, and the floodplain less representative of the kind of place where climate risks are paramount. Relative to farmers, policy makers will have a propensity to overestimate climate related risks.

# **3 Case study: adaptation to risks of flooding and drought in Mozambique**

We tested these hypotheses using qualitative and quantitative research methods. From a set of workshops held in May 2006, we qualitatively observed differences in farmers and policy makers’ perceptions of climate risks. From a questionnaire administered in September 2006, we gained quantitative evidence of the hypothesized biases. From a household survey conducted in December 2006, we obtained data suggesting that a recent information campaign had not led to an observed change in perceptions of climate risks among farmers.

# **3.1 Farmer and policy maker workshops**

In May 2006, we held a workshop with a group of 20 farmers in the village of Chiguidela, within a few hundred meters of the banks of the Limpopo River. The farmers told their stories of the floods as if they had just happened. They had to climb trees to avoid the floodwater, and then be evacuated by boat to higher ground. Those who did not do this died. Everything had been lost; the only way to identify where their houses had been, and what land was theirs, was by identifying particular trees. A woman said that she had stayed in resettlement village for two months, but that it was 16 km from her fields, and there was nowhere to farm on the high ground. She had no choice but to move back if she was to continue to farm. She didn’t know if the floods would return, and she feared that if they did, she would not be strong enough to survive them a second time. But she had no choice but to continue farming her fields, and facing the risk. A man said that evacuating from the floods was not hard, but then upon return they faced a lack of food, and that was the hard part. He didn’t think that the floods would return within his lifetime, but if they did, he felt confident that he could 8