Equitable Pathways to Climate-Smart Agriculture: Rethinking Adaptation as a Continuum

This research investigates the challenges faced by farmers in adapting to environmental change, focusing on differences among various types of farmers and how their practices change over time. This project specifically examines farmers are in a position to adapt farming practices to climate change, how does this ability vary among farmers, and what are the long-term impacts of adaptation to climate change on the sustainability of agriculture. This project addresses these questions by combining field data with spatial models of farmer decision-making. Research findings are disseminated at the community-level, and also to governmental and non-governmental officials connected to agricultural support services. Global environmental change processes have particular impacts on farmers given the tight linkage between agricultural production and climate/weather dynamics. Farmers face a complex decision context in deciding how and when to modify farming practices to cope with changing environmental conditions. This project investigates this decision making nexus at the farmer level taking into consideration farmer attributes and broader environmental, political, social, and economic contexts that affect these decisions. The research studies farmer adaptation through two decision cycles: the initial adoption of climate smart agriculture practices and whether farmers continue those practices after adoption. Data from focus groups, interviews, and surveys are integrated to examine how individual and community factors affect farmer adaptation, highlighting decision-pathways of historically disadvantaged groups. These data are combined to develop a spatially explicit agent-based model to understand how differences in adaptations and interactions impact the resilience of farming systems to climate change. The project generates policy insights to aid farmer adaptation and inform the deployment of agricultural support services. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.