Author: GAMBARO Martina
Last saved by: Sandra Ricart

Abstract submission template
SISC 11^th Annual Conference “SISC2023: Mission Adaptation!”
Milan, 22-24 November 2023

CONFIDENTIAL

# ORALE 

# Clustering farmers’ adaptation preferences to face climate change in northern Italy

# Author(s): Sandra RICART^(a), Lisa Ferrari^(a), Paolo Gazzotti^(a), and Andrea Castelletti^(a) 

(a) Environmental Intelligence Lab, Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy

# Corresponding author: Sandra Ricart, sandra.ricart@polimi.it  

# Topic
D. Climate adaptation strategies for tourism, industry, infrastructure, water management, and other socio-economic sectors

# Keywords
Climate change, extreme events, farmers, risk management, adaptation, behaviour, Italy

Long abstract

Climate change already has adverse impacts, with place- and problem-based implications due to higher temperatures, prolonged droughts, and more frequent and severe extreme events (IPCC 2022). It is arguably the most severe and complex challenge facing today’s society, a cross-cutting issue connected to other global challenges and affecting many sectors. Agricultural systems, the most vulnerable to climate and natural conditions, are adversely influenced by climate change through increased water stress, change in run-off patterns, seasonality fluctuation, and temperature variations (Tabari 2020). The approaching new climate reality calls for urgent and ambitious adaptation at all levels, including a transformative attitude and adjustment of certain behaviours in the present, in addition to the development of suitable strategies to tackle the foreseen impacts at different timescales (Marcos-Garcia et al. 2023). This implies a need for flexibility in policy design and planning for climate change adaptation (Werners et al. 2021), and building capability and capacity for making decisions despite uncertainty regarding future conditions at the local scale. An array of tools and methods have been developed in recent years to assist with decision-making, from robust participatory processes, to portfolio analysis, scenario discovery, real options, and adaptation pathways (Marchau et al. 2019). Although these tools reinforce policy transformation, the design of adaptation policies remains complex and needs to consider multiple challenges and perspectives as climate change is both a physical and social phenomenon, and individuals are not “blank slates” perceiving and facing climate change. 

Adaptation can be conceptualized as both a process and condition that encompasses an individual’s cognition and behavioural changes that are socially constructed and negotiated (Fischer et al. 2022). Thus, adaptation could either be a means to an end (process or mediating mechanism) or an end in itself (state or outcome) (Bagambilana and Rugumamu 2023). In this context, understanding how and why farmers adapt is critical for diminishing adaptation deficits and overcoming socially constructed adaptation limits, fostering community resilience, and improving risk assessment and communication (Noll et al. 2022). Despite uncertainty about the full extent of future change, farmers make changes in their practices, including crop diversification and introduction of resistant varieties, adjusting planting dates, increasing organic fertilizers, ensuring soil and water conservation, subscribing risk transfer mechanisms, such as insurance coverage, or incorporating climate services to assist decision-making (Ricart et al. 2022). Likewise, personal experience and local knowledge, together with social learning exchange, may help reduce agricultural systems’ vulnerability. As farmers are the implementation agents of adaptation policies and programs, their behaviour affects how these regional and local strategies are implemented and whether they are successful (Singh et al. 2022). Understanding farmers’ behaviour and the factors that affect their adaptive capacity is key to strengthening proactive adaptation strategies to climate change and ensuring agriculture resilience (Zobeidi et al. 2022). It helps local agricultural systems ensure food security or design and implement appropriate adaptive measures, such as incentives, laws, or institutional reforms, in order to reduce agricultural exposition and vulnerability (Monteleone et al. 2023), thereby improving the socioeconomic resilience of agricultural communities (Amir et al. 2020). 

Against this backdrop, this contribution presents the results of a well-structured online survey covering climate change adaptation measures and barriers. The survey was answered by a random sample of 460 farmers from the Lombardy region, northern Italy, a portion of the largest contiguous and most productive irrigated area in Europe. Two main research questions are considered: 1) To what extent do farmers adapt to climate change, and what barriers hinder increasing their adaptive capacity? And 2) Do risk attitudes and adaptation measures and barriers differ between farmers’ profiles? Descriptive statistics, econometrics, structural equation modeling techniques and clustering analysis were applied to characterize farmers’ profiles, identify cognitive factors influencing their adaptation behavior, and disentangle the magnitude and preferences underpinning their adaptive capacity. Results indicated that farmers are aware of climate change and perceive climate variability and impacts (e.g., warmer temperatures, heatwaves and droughts, and erratic rainfall patterns). Furthermore, farmers combine coping (e.g., weather and climate services, insurance) and preventive measures (e.g., less fertilization, crop diversification and rotation, soil conservation techniques). Findings also identified significant constraints preventing farmers from adopting more extensive adaptation measures (lack of government support, high cost of investment, too complex regulations). The structural model confirmed that being aware of climate change can reasonably anticipate the fluctuation in farmers’ behavior regarding perceived impacts. At the same time, less robustness was observed in discerning a causal relationship between risk perception and risk adaptation constructs. Interestingly, factors such as farming experience, farm size, irrigated surface, and main crop are key drivers determining risk perception and adaptation measures implementation. 

Furthermore, findings confirmed a degree of heterogeneity in farmers’ attitudes and preferences when identifying the most significant adaptation measures. Thus, farmers were grouped into four profiles that have in common the two most applied measures (access and use of weather services and reducing the use of fertilizers) but differ in the third most common one, reinforcing different adaptation pathways as farmers can start from different points and be affected by global trends in particular ways. Consequently, farmers can prioritize adaptation through 1) Crop diversification (most isolated farmers); 2) Cooperation (most insecure farmers); 3) Insurance mechanisms (most confident farmers); and 4) Climate services (most aware farmers). Their comparison highlights interesting points, such as that cluster 3 (oldest and most experienced farmers) and cluster 4 (youngest and most educated farmers) are the ones with the highest adaptation implementation rates, while in terms of examples of measures applied (e.g., crop diversification and rotation) more similarities are found between cluster 1 (most experienced and operating on a family level) and cluster 3. The research reinforces the most recent works balancing farmers’ adaptive capacity (e.g., Peng et al. 2022, Thi Tran and Chen 2022, Ricart et al. 2023) and provides recommendations for policy outreach at the local scale to reduce maladaptation.

References
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# Dissemination
I ACCEPT that my long abstract be published in the conference proceedings