Climate Change Resilience and Sustainable Tropical Agriculture: Farmers’ Perceptions, Reactive Adaptations and Determinants of Reactive Adaptations in Hainan, China

Abstract

The adversities of a changing climate in developing countries and the related impact on agriculture are directly dependent on the adaptive behavior of local farmers towards climate change events. The perception of farmers as basic executers of agricultural production plays a crucial role in their adaptation decisions. Through a field survey of 200 farmers in Hainan, China, this study covers the methodological gap in determining the reactive adaptations for coping with the changing climate and the underlying factors of farmers’ adaptive behavior. The results indicated that the smallholder farmers are well aware of climate change, and the majority of them are taking adaptive measures such as following up on weather forecast, changing crop varieties, conserving agriculture through soil conservation and/or agroforestry, modifying different farm operations, increasing investment in infrastructure, increasing non-agricultural income of household, switching to new genetically modified cultivars, and engaging in water conservation methods. A binary logistic regression analysis was performed to study the determinants of farmers’ adaptive behavior, and the results highlighted 10 significant factors affecting farmers’ adaptations, including the age and gender of the farmer, non-agricultural income, training, credit access, policy demand, and perceived changes in climate change events. Our results are in line with the extant literature. The percentage of consistency (POC) was also calculated to evaluate the BLR results, and the overall POC was 60.7%. On the policy front, several suggestions are made based on derived conclusions, such as arranging training programs as a supplement to policymaking, incorporating significant factors for the development of high protection capacity, accounting for gender differences, and supporting crop insurance via subsidies.