Climate Change Policy Adaptation Among California Farmers: How Policy Experience and Attitudes Affect Climate Change Perceptions and Behaviors

Global climate change will require adjustments to society and systems across multiple geographic, time, and ecological scales.  However, research on global climate change in agriculture has largely focused on the potential biophysical impacts of climate change.  Here we contend that not enough emphasis has been placed on understanding political and socio-economic climate change impacts that may affect agricultural communities.  We use the term “policy adaptation” to describe how farmers perceive and may respond to climate change policies and suggest that understanding policy adaptation should be assessed in tandem with understanding biophysical adaptation.  Based on broader theories of environmental behavior, we hypothesize that farmers’ policy attitudes and behaviors are a function of past climate experience, past environmental policies, and current climate change beliefs.  These hypotheses are tested with a structural equation model based on a mail survey (n=162) in Yolo County, California along with semi-structured qualitative interviews (n=11) conducted by our UC Davis research group in 2010-2011.  Policy adaptation and policy experiences are a key component of farmer’s climate change perceptions.  Farmers ranked climate change regulations as the most concerning risk for the future compared with water and temperature impacts.  Perceptions of past environmental policies strongly influenced farmer’s climate change beliefs and future concern for climate policies; however, farmer’s past environmental policy experiences did not influence their overall willingness to participate in a government incentive program for climate change.  For policymakers this suggests that farmers are willing to overlook their past policy concerns if climate change programs provide assistance and benefits.  The strong role that policy experiences had in affecting climate change belief and policy attitudes suggests that future research should consider policy adaptation as a central concern in agricultural climate change decision-making.