Lessons from farmers' adaptive practices to climate change in China: a systematic literature review

Motivating factors of farmers' adaptation behaviors to climate change in China: A meta-analysis

Adapting to climate change is critical to building sustainable and resilient agricultural systems. Understanding farmers' perceptions of climate change has become the key to the effective implementation of climate change adaptation policies. This research draws multidisciplinary attention to how farmers participate in decision-making on adaptation behaviors and provides useful insights for realizing synergies between environmental change and agricultural production. In this work, we conducted a meta-analysis of 63 quantitative studies on Chinese farmers' adaptation to climate change to assess the relationship between motivational factors and adaptation behavior. Our analysis highlights that farmers' perceptions of precipitation changes are often inaccurate; however, other psychological factors, such as perception, experience, and risk attitude, significantly positively impact their adaptation behavior. In addition, different climate regions are the main source of high heterogeneity in inter-study comparisons of climate change perception, and the effect of climate regions may therefore constitute a moderating factor that weakens the positive relationship between climate change perception and adaptive behavior. Furthermore, this study highlights the need to intervene at the household level to enhance farmers' adaptability to climate change, which includes providing support through income diversification, early warning information services, training, assistance, credit, subsidies, and other resources. In the future, research on how perception, experience, and risk interact to affect adaptive behavior should be strengthened.

Water rights reform and water-saving irrigation: evidence from China

As a market-based water resource management, the water rights reform (WRR) will allocate water rights to water users and allow water users to trade water rights, which can realize the reallocation across water users. In this context, the adoption of water-saving irrigation (WSI) is an important technical form to adapt to the reform. Based on this, this paper studies the impacts of the WRR on WSI using the difference-in-differences (DID) strategy. The results show that the WRR could increase the land area for WSI by an average of 13.63%. The WRR could promote the expansion of high-efficiency irrigation mainly because the WRR could promote the expansion of spray and drip irrigation areas, and micro-irrigation land areas, which are high-efficiency water-saving irrigation technologies. In addition, the WRR also could improve agricultural production by increasing agricultural water productivity and planting area (including the sown area of grain crops and cash crops), but the WRR does not reduce agricultural water extraction. Therefore, the WRR could increase agricultural production without increasing agricultural water extraction.

Incentives for promoting climate change adaptation technologies in agriculture: an evolutionary game approach

Climate change adaptation technologies (CCATs) have become increasingly important for farmers as they face the challenges of climate change and natural disasters. Despite this, many rural areas still rely on traditional agricultural techniques. To promote the adoption of CCATs in agriculture, it is necessary to explore the incentives and conditions for the effectiveness of the policy. We develop an evolutionary game model to analyze the behavior of local governments and farmers in promoting CCATs. Our findings indicate that, under certain conditions, the promotion of CCATs can achieve equilibrium. The incentive for farmers to adopt CCATs increases within a certain range when local governments provide risk subsidies and cost sharing. When subsidies are too high, however, local governments may choose not to promote CCATs, which reduces the incentives for farmers to adopt them. Publicity is also an important factor in promoting CCATs. Our study provides insight into the development of policies aimed at promoting CCATs in agriculture.

Exploring the future of GM technology in sustainable local food systems in Colombia

The security of Earth's food systems is challenged by shifting regional climates. While agricultural processes are disrupted by climate change, they also play a large role in contributing to destabilizing greenhouse gases. Finding new strategies to increase yields while decreasing agricultural environmental impacts is essential. Tropical agriculture is particularly susceptible to climate change: local, smallholder farming, which provides a majority of the food supply, is high risk and has limited adaptation capacity. Rapid, inexpensive, intuitive solutions are needed, like the implementation of genetically modified (GM) crops. In the Latin American tropics, high awareness and acceptance of GM technologies, opportunities to test GM crops as part of local agricultural educations, and their known economic benefits, support their use. However, this is not all that is needed for the future of GM technologies in these areas: GM implementation must also consider environmental and social sustainability, which can be unique to a locality. Primarily from the perspective of its educators, the potential of a rural Colombian university in driving GM implementation is explored, including the role of this type of university in producing agricultural engineers who can innovate with GM to meet regionally-dependent environmental and cultural needs that could increase their sustainability.