Suchergebnisse

AbstractCover crops are grown between periods of regular crop production or planted into crops with the primary purpose of protecting and improving soil health. These crops possess several resilience-enhancing properties that are well suited to help farmers adapt to climate change. Through an "adaptive capacities framework," we examine how farmers' adaptive capacities—contextualized within institutional and environmental conditions—can influence their decision to use cover crops. We use generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs) to examine the relative importance of (i) "internal" variables—farmers' perceived capacity to act; (ii) "external" or "objective" resources—assets and entitlements; and (iii) contextual variables—the institutional and environmental context within which adaptation occurs, as predictors of farmers' use of cover crops. Our results suggest that several objective and perceived adaptive capacities are positively associated with farmers' decisions to use cover crops, and formal institutions such as risk management subsidies are correlated with lower use of cover crops.

In industrialized societies, techno-optimism is a belief that human ingenuity, through improved science and technology, will ultimately provide remedies to most current and future threats to human well-being, such as diseases, climate change, and poverty. Here we examine (a) whether techno-optimism is found among Midwestern corn and soybean farmers and (b) how this confidence in human ingenuity influences their support for climate change adaptation. By examining data from a survey of nearly 5,000 grain farmers in the Midwestern United States, we found that greater techno-optimism can reduce farmers' support for climate change adaptation and increase their propensity to express a preference to delay adaptation-related actions. This study advances our understanding of how social and cognitive factors influence farmers' attitude toward climate change. Findings from this study can also help extension educators to develop outreach programs that are sensitive to farmers' views about the ability of science and technology to solve climate change–related issues.

AbstractPotential climate‐change‐related impacts to agriculture in the upper Midwest pose serious economic and ecological risks to the U.S. and the global economy. On a local level, farmers are at the forefront of responding to the impacts of climate change. Hence, it is important to understand how farmers and their farm operations may be more or less vulnerable to changes in the climate. A vulnerability index is a tool commonly used by researchers and practitioners to represent the geographical distribution of vulnerability in response to global change. Most vulnerability assessments measure objective adaptive capacity using secondary data collected by governmental agencies. However, other scholarship on human behavior has noted that sociocultural and cognitive factors, such as risk perceptions and perceived capacity, are consequential for modulating people's actual vulnerability. Thus, traditional assessments can potentially overlook people's subjective perceptions of changes in climate and extreme weather events and the extent to which people feel prepared to take necessary steps to cope with and respond to the negative effects of climate change. This article addresses this knowledge gap by: (1) incorporating perceived adaptive capacity into a vulnerability assessment; (2) using spatial smoothing to aggregate individual‐level vulnerabilities to the county level; and (3) evaluating the relationships among different dimensions of adaptive capacity to examine whether perceived capacity should be integrated into vulnerability assessments. The result suggests that vulnerability assessments that rely only on objective measures might miss important sociocognitive dimensions of capacity. Vulnerability indices and maps presented in this article can inform engagement strategies for improving environmental sustainability in the region.