What motivates farm-level adaptation in India? A systematic review

Abstract

Indian farmers are adopting several farm-level adaptation options to mitigate potential impacts from climate change and extreme events. Although different studies have identified determinants, there is limited literature on systematic review of factors that drive farmer's adaptive behaviour, particularly in India. This chapter aims to address this gap, and in doing so, it furnishes three major findings. First, non-climatic factors like demographic characteristics, asset and income, education, dependency on agriculture, farm characteristics and access to financial institutions are observed as major motivating factors. Second, this chapter advocates future studies to establish the causal relationship of farm-level options with climate change and extreme events. Third, there is a paucity of studies with reference to perception, risk attitude behaviour, behavioural anomalies, climate information and government policies related to generic and specific disaster. These remarks render important avenues for scholarly communities and policy makers for expanding the domains of future research while realigning existing plans to address the observed gaps and develop evidence-based policies for scaling up farm-level adaptation mechanisms.