Abstract
Small-scale farmers are highly threatened by climate change. Experts often base their interventions to support farmers to adapt to climate change on their own perception of farmers’ livelihood risks. However, if differences in risk perception between farmers and experts exist, these interventions might fail. Thus, for effective design and implementation of adaptation strategies for farmers, it is necessary to understand farmers’ perception and how it influences their decision-making. We analyze farmers’ and experts’ systemic view on climate change threats in relation to other agricultural livelihood risks and assess the differences between their perceptions. For Cauca, Colombia, we found that experts and farmers perceived climate-related and other livelihood risks differently. While farmers’ perceived risks were a failure in crop production and lack of access to health and educational services, experts, in contrast, perceived insecurity and the unreliable weather to be the highest risks for farmers. On barriers that prevent farmers from taking action against risks, experts perceived both external factors such as the national policy and internal factors such as the adaptive capacity of farmers to be the main barriers. Farmers ranked the lack of information, especially about weather and climate, as their main barrier to adapt. Effective policies aiming at climate change adaptation need to relate climate change risks to other production risks as farmers often perceive climate change in the context of other risks. Policymakers in climate change need to consider differences in risk perception.
Highlights
Climate change poses major challenges to our society, especially in the agricultural sector in developing countries (Vermeulen et al 2011)
While experts focus on communicating climate change risks, in cases such as we found in Cauca, farmers do not see such information as practical since their highest perceived risk is the poverty trap and the sum of risks related to the agricultural production of which climate risks are merely a part
Our findings show that farmers in Colombia do not perceive climate risks separately; they are embedded in their mental models of agricultural livelihood risks
Summary
Climate change poses major challenges to our society, especially in the agricultural sector in developing countries (Vermeulen et al 2011). One major challenge with the design and implementation of adequate actions is the complexity of the systems characterized by interactions between environmental and human dynamics at different scales (Turner et al 2003). Delayed and unexpected feedback loops, nonlinearities, and abrupt rather than gradual changes render the climate system exceedingly hard to predict and the reactions of the exposed human system even less foreseeable (Alley et al 2003). These entailed uncertainties make decision- and policymaking a difficult task
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