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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.
Sec. Climate-Smart Food Systems
Volume 8 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2024.1471238
This article is part of the Research Topic Conservation Agriculture For Food Security And Climate Resilience View all articles

Fostering adaptation to climate change among farmers in Pakistan: the influential role of farmers' climate change knowledge and adaptive capacity

Provisionally accepted
  • 1 Department of Economics, Division of Management and Administrative Science, University of Education, Lahore, Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan
  • 2 Department of Agricultural Extension and Rural Society, College of Food and Agriculture Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Introduction: Adaptation to climate change (ACC) is imperative to avoid deleterious consequences of climate change in agriculture. However, the uptake of adaptation measures has been slow among farmers because low adaptive capacity (AC) in developing countries, particularly in Pakistan. Therefore, farmers and their supporting institutions have been successful in introducing technological innovations to respond and adapt to environmental challenges. The study in hands intends to find the impact of farming technologies along with human, financial, social, physical, natural and climate information resources that support AC and hence ACC. Methods: The study collected that data from 360 farmers in Punjab through multistage random sampling technique. Binary logit model and odds ratio are used to find the factors affecting ACC. The study also utilizes correlation tests to show the correlation between each pair of variables we included in the analysis. Results: The results indicate that physical capital such as ownership of tube-well, transportation, sowing and harvesting tools by the farmers build farmers' AC and consequently determine the ACC such as change crop variety, change crop type, change planting dates, soil conservation, water conservation, and diversification. Findings also revealed that human capital (age, education, family size and labour), financial capital (off-farm employment, access on marketing of produce and agricultural credit), social capital (farmers-to-farmers extensions, access on extension services and membership of farm association) and natural capital (land ownership, tenancy status and location of farm) were pointedly related to farm households' ACC strategies. Odds (likelihood) of adaptation is more for farm technology users as compared to non-users. Discussion: The analysis of the study shows that the climate information resource amplifies the adaptation to climate change: technology allows farming to be much, much more efficient while climate change knowledge self-motivates farmers to adapt more ACC measures. Our findings provide evidence to provide credits and financial support for farming technologies that speed up the ACC in the long-run while in the short-run climate information should be spread among farming communities.

    Keywords: adaptation to climate change, Climate change knowledge, adaptive capacity, logit model, Odds Ratio

    Received: 26 Jul 2024; Accepted: 16 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Mustafa and Alhafi Alotaibi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Ghulam Mustafa, Department of Economics, Division of Management and Administrative Science, University of Education, Lahore, Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.