Abstract
This study set up online virtual communities consisting of farmers and stakeholders involved in agriculture and nonfarmers living in rural areas interested in agricultural production. We conducted a deliberation within the communities for 14 days on identifying important climate change adaptation policies for 30 years later under climate change impacts with the relevant knowledge from experts. During the deliberation, after self-introduction took place including the realization of climate change impacts, the participants were provided with the expert knowledge on impacts of climate change, adaptation policies in agricultural sector and so on, then the following discussions covered issues such as the distribution of agricultural produce, insufficient successors, and support for farmers, such as impacts on crops during disasters concerning future scenarios. Attitude changes before and after deliberation were observed in terms of the pros and cons of climate change adaptation policies in agriculture and rural areas, but statistically significant differences were not observed. On the other hand, a statistically significant change was observed in some determinants of the pros and cons, such as the perceived effectiveness and goal intention. This structural change results from that the participants became aware of a different perspective through deliberation. Thus, the online deliberation process was effective to some extent in increasing knowledge and promoting deeper understanding among participants during inquiry and reasoning was deepened in the process as they listened to the opinions of others in a different position with a different idea as well as read and search for scientific findings and information provided by experts.
Highlights
The results indicate that participants were statistically significantly more likely to think that the climate change impact and damage to agriculture and rural areas are more serious after deliberation than before deliberation (t (59) = 2.61, p < 0.05)
On the other hand, there was a possibility of no changes in the determinants before and after deliberation for transformative measures, suggesting that structural changes in the perception of transformative measures are likely more difficult to facilitate than those in other climate change adaptation policies
Changes in mean score before and after deliberation were observed in terms of the pros and cons of climate change adaptation policies in agriculture and rural areas, but statistically significant differences were not observed
Summary
The 5th assessment report [1] by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) asserts that “There is no room for doubt for warming of the climate system”, and observed long-term data by the Japan Meteorological Agency shows that, in Japan, the average temperature is rising and the number of occurrences of severe rain over a short period and years with instances of extremely heavy rain or little rain is increasing [2,3]. Examples include a consensus conference where experts and the general public or stakeholders aim for decision-making and proposals on policies for science and technology (Society for Techno-Innovation of Agriculture, Forestry and Fishery [6], Kobayashi [7], Wakamatsu [8]) and a debate-based public opinion survey in which randomly sampled citizens obtains information from experts and conducts questions and answers over the courses of discussion on a specific theme and policies changes in their opinion (Committee for public debate on choices for energy and environment [9], Fishkin [10], Sone et al [11]) These methods emphasize the will and attitude expressed by citizens as well as the quality of decisions. Few studies have discussed the effects of citizen participation in online climate change communication (Schäfer [22]), and even fewer studied climate change adaptation
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