Smallholder farmers’ climate change cognition, adaptation practices and perceived adaptation efficacy in the Yangtze River Basin, China

Rui He, Jianjun Jin, Xin Qiu, Chenyang Zhang and Guochuan Peng

Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 2025, vol. 68, issue 4, 773-796

Abstract: Climate change adaptation is a dynamic process that involves prior cognition, actual action, and subsequent perceived efficacy. However, few studies have focused on whether measures influence perceived adaptation efficacy or even provided comprehensive conceptualizations of the links among cognition, behaviors, and efficacy. This study developed an integrated conceptual framework and employed econometric models to determine their influencing relationships using household survey data from the Yangtze River Basin of China. Our findings reveal that farmers perceive that they maintain negative risk and adaptation cognition, although they have high perceived adaptation efficacy. Most importantly, climate change cognition has significant impacts on six kinds of adaptation practices. Perceived adaptation efficacies are only positively influenced by agro-technical management, agro-environmental improvement, financial support, and external help. Crop adjustment lowers land adaptation efficacy, and livelihood transformation reduces the efficacy of family, crop, and land. Corresponding policy recommendations are made to help improve targeted and dynamic adaptation capacity. Our ideas and findings may be complementary to existing research and easily repeatable for future investigations about climate change adaptation worldwide.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09640568.2023.2269474 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jenpmg:v:68:y:2025:i:4:p:773-796

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CJEP20

DOI: 10.1080/09640568.2023.2269474

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Environmental Planning and Management is currently edited by Dr Neil Powe, Dr Ken Willis and George Bill Page

More articles in Journal of Environmental Planning and Management from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().