Global and Local Concerns: What Motivates Farmers to Mitigate and Adapt to Climate Change?.

Abstract

In response to agriculture's vulnerability and contribution to climate change, many governments are developing initiatives that promote the adoption of mitigation and adaptation practices among farmers. Since most climate policies affecting agriculture rely on voluntary efforts by individual farmers, success requires a sound understanding of the factors that motivate farmers to change practices. Recent evidence suggests that past experience with the effects of climate change and the psychological distance associated with people's concern for global and local impacts can influence environmental behavior. Here we surveyed farmers in a representative rural county in California's Central Valley to examine how their intention to adopt mitigation and adaptation practices is influenced by previous climate experiences and their global and local concerns about climate change. The statistical analysis used a series multiple-mediation models to test for direct and indirect relationships between the independent, dependent, and mediating variables detailed in Table 1. The mediating and dependent variables represent socio-cognitive constructs developed using factor analysis to group highly correlated questions into a single scale with a Cronbach's α reliability coefficient ≥ 0.70. The multiple-mediation analysis was conducted according to a product-of-coefficients approach using seemingly unrelated regression and bootstrapped standard errors. Our results indicate that perceived change in water availability had significant effects on farmers' intention to adopt mitigation and adaptation strategies, which were mediated through global and local concerns respectively. This suggests that mitigation is largely motivated by psychologically distant concerns and beliefs about climate change, while adaptation is driven by psychologically proximate concerns for local impacts. This match between attitudes and behaviors according to their psychological distance or “construal level” in the theoretical parlance, indicates that policy and outreach initiatives may benefit by framing climate impacts and behavioral goals concordantly; either in a global context for mitigation or a local context for adaptation.