Abstract
۱٫ Introduction
۲٫ Study area
۳٫ Materials and methods
۴٫ Results and discussion
۵٫ Conclusions and recommendations
Acknowledgement
Appendix A. Supplementary data
Research Data
References
Abstract
In the context of global climate change and frequent meteorological hazards, farmers’ adaptive behavior has attracted attention of many scholars. Meanwhile, the perceived adaption efficacy is related to the farmer’s ability by which they can accurately and effectively cope with influences of climate change and meteorological hazards. Based on the survey data from interviews with cherry growers of 9 villages in Shaanxi Province of China, this study employs the Theory of Planned Behavior and path analysis to identify the factors affecting the degree of perceived adaption efficacy, and then utilizes the ordinal logistic regression model to explore the influence mechanism of cherry growers’ attributes, perception of climate change and perception of meteorological hazards at different stages of cherry growth on the weaker perceived adaption efficacy. The results show that attitude toward the behavior, subjective norm and perceived behavioral control of cherry growers all have significant positive influences on the perceived adaption efficacy. The relatively weaker perceived adaption efficacy is mainly affected by cherry growers’ age, household agricultural income, perception of local climate warming in the past 30 years and perception of frost. Finally, targeted recommendations are put forward on the basis of above conclusions.
Introduction
The Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of IPCC points out that climate change and meteorological hazards pose a serious threat to agriculture, villages and farmers’ livelihoods [1]. In particular, the sensitivity of developing countries are more pronounced because of their relatively weaker economy and inadequate social infrastructure, where the majority of population make a living by doing agricultural work [2]. In this context, adaptation has become the only way to deal with climate change and meteorological hazards [1]. Scholars have carried out much on the issue of farmers’ adaptation to climate change, and have made rich research achievements in theoretical construction [3–۶], adaptive behavior conforming local conditions [5,7–۱۳] and other aspects. In order to have an in-depth understanding of the motivation and the orientation of farmers’ adaptive behavior, it is necessary to study not only what kind of adaptive behavior they choose in the face of climate change and meteorological hazards, but also how they evaluate their choices, that is, farmers’ perceived adaption efficacy, which will directly affect the motivation and the orientation of farmers’ adaptive behavior [14]. Nevertheless, current studies have focused more on the specific adaptive strategies of farmers to climate change and less on the perceived adaption efficacy [15]. Therefore, this study can attract more attention to farmers’ perceived adaption efficacy and help the local government deepen understanding of it so as to formulate more favorable policies to aid farmers in adapting to climate change and meteorological hazards. Farmers are particularly susceptible to climate change [16], for highly depending on natural resources [17] which are extremely vulnerable to climate change. So farmers are reckoned as the main body of the study on adapting to climate change and meteorological hazards. According to the focus of agricultural activities, farmers are divided into different categories. Some studies were carried out on farmers who grow crops [18–20], some focused on pastoralists [21,22], and others were concerned with fishermen [8].