Coping with drought risk: empirical analysis of farmers’ drought adaptation in the south-west Netherlands

Abstract

Climate change projections show that periods of droughts are likely to increase, causing decreasing water availability, salinization, and consequently farm income loss in the south-west Netherlands. Adaptation is the key to decrease a farmer’s drought vulnerability and to secure the agricultural sector’s performance at the aggregate level. Possible adaptation strategies include responses at the field scale, farm-level measures and joint adaptation measures. Using the results of a recent survey, we explore farmers’ adaptive behaviour to drought. We give detailed insight into the influence of risk appraisal and coping appraisal factors on the current level of farmers’ adaptation motivation and the adoption of three types of adaptive responses. Our findings show that behavioural factors make a significant contribution to explain the actual level of farmers’ adaptation motivation. Furthermore, we find that components of threat and coping appraisal influence adoption decisions differently across three types of drought adaptation measures.