Glob. Environ. Change 50, 178–189 (2018)

Farmers have always had to cope with weather and climate variability, and so may be particularly adept at incorporating climate change adaptation into their decision-making. However, despite an expressed willingness to adapt, farmers in South Africa’s Western Cape have inconsistently adopted Conservation Agriculture techniques that could reduce vulnerability to climate change and promote food security, undermining these long-term benefits.

Credit: Kieran Findlater

Kieran Findlater and colleagues from University of British Columbia and University of Cape Town interviewed commercial grain farmers in South Africa about the farming risks they faced. Coding of explicit references to climate change revealed that these farmers believed that climate change was occurring, were concerned about its impacts and thought that these impacts could be managed through farm-level adaptation. However, modelling of the expressed causal relationships between risks and agricultural practices revealed that farmers did not connect adaptations to climate change with adaptations to weather and other ‘normal’ risks. This suggests that while farmers are explicitly sensitive to the risks posed by climate change, they do not implicitly incorporate them into their existing risk-management practices.