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

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.