What psychological factors lead to the abandonment of cultivated land by coastal farmers? An interpretation based on the psychological distance

Abstract

For a long time, the research on the cultivated land abandonment behavior of farmers, caused by natural constraints such as coastal ecological environment vulnerability and frequent extreme climates, has received extensive attention. However, few scholars pay attention to the impact of psychological construction of farmers’ environmental risk perception on abandoned farming behavior, especially the use of psychological distance (PD) to quantify this abstract psychological process. Taking Shankou Town, Guangxi, China as an example, this study combines the PD in the field of sociology with the construal level theory to build a PD framework for coastal farmers. A structural equation model was used to explore the influence mechanism of the social, temporal, hypothetical, and spatial distances on farmers’ cultivated land abandonment behavior. We found that coastal land abandonment is affected by social trust and the probability of extreme weather, although the risk preference under the ‘discount rate’ is not significantly affected. At the same time, the closer the spatial distance between the residence and the coastline, the higher the abandonment of cultivated land, although with a different impact. In addition, population mobility and human-sea connection were found to play a mediating role in the effect of psychological distance on cultivated land abandonment. We confirmed that the direction of the effects of the four types of psychological distance on land abandonment behavior is not consistent. This study is helpful to understand the cultivated land abandonment behavior of farmers in coastal zone, and tries to provide reference for coastal zone planting planning.