Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MODFaBe (Modelling individual farmer behaviours in Coupled Human Natural Systems under changing climate and society)
Reporting period: 2020-09-01 to 2022-08-31
Climate change impacts such as high temperature, reduced rainfall, and increased frequency of extreme weather events will add new threats to irrigation systems and will compound existing human pressures through changes to hydrological processes and socio-ecosystem interactions. Social learning is considered an important issue to reinforce individuals and communities' adaptive capacity because 1) Local experience can be shared and compared and this would be useful to identify common patterns and individual strategies (to be transferred to policy-makers), and 2) assess the perception and effectiveness of climate change responses is the first step towards adaptation. In this context, modelling human behaviour can be used as a safe laboratory for policy experimentation, testing the effectiveness of strategies and policy measures on climate change by learning from human experience. Farmers are key constituents in the social-learning process of understanding both climate change impacts on food and water systems and how best to mitigate and adapt to these impacts. Modelling human behaviour, however, is rather a non-trivial task: human behaviour is well recognized as a complex non-linear, multi-variate process due to the high heterogeneity and uncertainties in human cognition and decision-making processes. The MODFABE project aims to increase the robustness of decision-making processes in Coupled Human-Nature Systems (CHNS) by modelling farmers’ perceptions and adaptation capacity to climate change, also including feedback from irrigation districts managers. The MODFABE’s core is to integrate observational data (farmers’ perception and irrigation districts perspectives) into an Agent-Based Model (ABM) to simulate end users, managers and decision-makers attitudes and increase the rationality of farmers’ interventions regarding water resources and climate change adaptation, by considering multiple competing purposes and a multiobjective context.
We delved into which climate change driving factors affect irrigation by (i) reviewing existing data and literature on climate change irrigation constraints, and (ii) exploring the climate change perception from farmers and citizens to identify mutual and divergent attitudes. We also performed two review papers to synthetize main learnings and identify gaps on 1) farmers behaviour regarding climate change and 3) consistency between farmers' perceptions and climate data. This background has been used to carry out an empirical analysis by conducting an interview to 13 irrigation districts and a survey to 460 farmers. The obtained results regarding farmers' behaviour highlighted how farmers are not ‘blank slates’, they socially construct risk based on risk exposition, aversion and perception built on previous knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and concerns about if and how climate changes. The farmer dominant profile was a man of 45-64 years old, with higher education and an experience of more than 30 years, member of an union farm and of an irrigation district, without off-farm activity and succession intention. The survey provided interesting learnings on climate change attitudes, such as the consideration of climate change as the single most serious problem (85% of the respondents) or the top3 most perceived impacts, all of them related to changes in extreme events patterns, such as warmer temperatures and heatwaves, increased frequency of droughts, and floods affecting in a more intense form. In the face of these impacts, farmers opt to apply different adaptation measures, such as reducing the use or improving use of fertilizers, crop diversification or rotation and applying for insurance to cover extreme events impacts. Likewise, irrigation districts’ narratives suggest they had already experienced or witnessed negative impacts from extreme weather events in the past, mainly caused by droughts and floods, which are increasing in intensity and severity. Results provide different concerns, such as how to promote water-efficiency techniques without conditioning groundwater dynamics, what will be the effects of the new ecological flow on water supply, or which actions can be introduced to reduce upstream-downstream water tensions. Storylines shared by the irrigation districts attest to this point, providing life experiences that influence their perception; so those who have been directly affected by extreme climatic events tend to report that the probability of such events happening again is relatively high. Then we combined an hydrological-agronomic model (IdrAgra) with an ABM containing a "risk aversion" panel in which farmers and irrigation districts' perspectives have been included to check if climate change perception affects decision-making in hydrological and agronomic terms. Finally we identified potential interventions for action at the decision-making level, contributing to knowledge transfer between those suffering from climate change impacts (farmers), those managing water resources availability affected by climate change scenarios (irrigation districts) and those deciding potential measures to face current and oncoming challenges (policy-makers). Results have been published in scientific publications and international conferences. Three reports and two policy briefs have been delivered to report main findings for policy-makers. The website of the project and the social network profiles have been used to communicate main results to a non specialized audience. Local newspapers published the advances of the research, while the main results were presented in the European Researcher's Night 2021 and the MSCA dissemination frameworks promoted by the host institution. Policy briefs have been shared with local and regional farm associations to ensure that results arrive to individual farmers.
1. Direct – short term benefits:
a) Tested effectiveness of current climate change adaptation measures and recognized best-practices according to farmers and irrigation districts’ perceptions.
b) Determined considerations about the nature of adaptation measures: protective or opportunistic, individual or collective, and the neighbourhood effect.
c) Provided, detailed, and contrasted new primary data and background on individual farmers’ behaviour and perception of climate change awareness, impacts, actions and barriers for action
d) Cleared characterization of the heterogeneity of farmers’ profiles according to their climate change adaptation capacity: four different clusters for which specific actions and policies can be promoted to reduce their vulnerability
2. Indirect – long term benefits:
a) Strengthened collaboration between farmers, managers and decision-makers and increased understanding of respective roles in climate change adaptation
b) Promoted knowledge exchange between nature and social sciences when analysing climate change adaptation in multifunctional water systems
c) Increased comfortability of farmers when analysing climate change potential impacts and responses (give voice to the farmer)
a) Tested effectiveness of current climate change adaptation measures and recognized best-practices according to farmers and irrigation districts’ perceptions.
b) Determined considerations about the nature of adaptation measures: protective or opportunistic, individual or collective, and the neighbourhood effect.
c) Provided, detailed, and contrasted new primary data and background on individual farmers’ behaviour and perception of climate change awareness, impacts, actions and barriers for action
d) Cleared characterization of the heterogeneity of farmers’ profiles according to their climate change adaptation capacity: four different clusters for which specific actions and policies can be promoted to reduce their vulnerability
2. Indirect – long term benefits:
a) Strengthened collaboration between farmers, managers and decision-makers and increased understanding of respective roles in climate change adaptation
b) Promoted knowledge exchange between nature and social sciences when analysing climate change adaptation in multifunctional water systems
c) Increased comfortability of farmers when analysing climate change potential impacts and responses (give voice to the farmer)