Exploring socio-natural factors of farmers’ adaptation: A review on risk awareness and perception towards climate change

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. This type of results could contribute to reformulate policy interventions by considering farmers’ recommendations and preferences to better respond to climate change from local experience.