Smallholder farmers’ climate change cognition, adaptation practices and perceived adaptation efficacy in the Yangtze River Basin, China

AbstractClimate change adaptation is a dynamic process that involves prior cognition, actual action, and subsequent perceived efficacy. However, few studies have focused on whether measures influence perceived adaptation efficacy or even provided comprehensive conceptualizations of the links among cognition, behaviors, and efficacy. This study developed an integrated conceptual framework and employed econometric models to determine their influencing relationships using household survey data from the Yangtze River Basin of China. Our findings reveal that farmers perceive that they maintain negative risk and adaptation cognition, although they have high perceived adaptation efficacy. Most importantly, climate change cognition has significant impacts on six kinds of adaptation practices. Perceived adaptation efficacies are only positively influenced by agro-technical management, agro-environmental improvement, financial support, and external help. Crop adjustment lowers land adaptation efficacy, and livelihood transformation reduces the efficacy of family, crop, and land. Corresponding policy recommendations are made to help improve targeted and dynamic adaptation capacity. Our ideas and findings may be complementary to existing research and easily repeatable for future investigations about climate change adaptation worldwide.Keywords: Climate change cognitionadaptation practicesperceived adaptation efficacyadaptation capacityYangtze River Basin AcknowledgementsWe appreciate all the participants for their cooperation. We are grateful to the editor and anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions, which have led to significant improvement of the early versions of the manuscript.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Data availability statementThe data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant number 42271203) and the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program (Grant number 2019QZKK0608).