Ziyuan Kexue (Jul 2023)
The impact of farmers’ adaptive behavior to climate change on their water poverty
Abstract
[Objective] The purpose of this study was to analyze the impact of farmers’ climate change adaptive behavior adoption on farmers’ water poverty and its mechanism of action in order to effectively respond to complex climate change and alleviate farmers’ water poverty. [Methods] Using the survey data from 603 rural households in Shaanxi Province and Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, this study constructed a micro-scale water poverty index to measure the level of farmers’ water poverty. On this basis, a counterfactual framework was constructed using the propensity score matching method to empirically analyze the relationship between climate change adaptive behavior and farmers’ water poverty. [Result] (1) The adoption of climate change adaptive behavior can effectively alleviate farmers’ water poverty. The counterfactual model addressed the estimation bias caused by the self-selection problem of farmers’ adaptation behaviors and the results show that the average treatment effects of engineering, non-engineering, and water-saving climate change adaptation behaviors on farmers’ water poverty are significant using different matching methods including the Caliper-based K-nearest neighbor matching, radius matching, and kernel matching. (2) The effects of adopting different types of climate change adaptive behaviors differed significantly, with water-saving behaviors having the largest effect, followed by engineering behaviors. Under the counterfactual hypothesis, the adoption of water-saving behaviors reduces farmers’ water poverty by 0.227, while the adoption of engineering and non-engineering behaviors effectively reduces farmers’ water poverty by 0.210 and 0.166, respectively, compared with farmer groups who do not adopt climate change adaptation behaviors. (3) Climate change adaptive behaviour affects farmers’ water poverty by increasing pesticide application efficiency, agricultural machinery use efficiency, fertilizer application efficiency and agricultural water use efficiency, respectively. [Conclusion] The adoption of climate change adaptive behavior by farmers can alleviate the water poverty of farmers by improving the efficiency of pesticide application, agricultural machinery use, fertilizer application, and agricultural water use. In the future, farmers’ water poverty still needs to be constantly concerned to help achieve the goals of rural revitalization and common prosperity.
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