Abstract

Keywords

Abbreviations

۱٫ Introduction

۲٫ Theoretical framework

۳٫ Methods

۴٫ Results

۵٫ Discussion

۶٫ Conclusions, limitations and future research implications

Declarations

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Declaration of Competing Interest

Acknowledgements

Appendix.

References

Abstract

Climate variability exerts severe threats to farmers and agriculture related activities and farmers. A growing number of studies have paid attention to mitigating carbon emission and adapting to climate change. Very few studies, however, have investigated farmers’ health risk management associated with climate change. This study, therefore, proposed a hybrid theoretical model to explore the roles of farmers’ climate risk perceptions and facilitating conditions in farmers’ health risk management, both theoretically and empirically. Using a sample of 1499 rice farmers in China, the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was adopted for empirical analysis, and the Multi-group Analysis (MGA) was employed to examine the heterogeneity among farmers’ socio-economic status. This study found that farmers’ perceived severity of climate change and perceived benefits of addressing climate change have significant impacts on their resources and technical facilitating conditions, in turn, those two types of facilitating conditions significantly impact their health risk management intentions. Subjective norms are also identified as predictors of resources facilitating condition and technical facilitating condition. In addition, farmers with lower income are more likely to suffer from health risks induced by climate change. They have fewer resources for resilience and maintaining health. Based on the findings identified above, strategies for coping with the negative impacts of climate change on farmers’ health were proposed for climate adaptation from the perspective of health risk management.

۱٫ Introduction

Climate variability has been continuously posing a threat to agricultural activities and humans’ welfare. The scientific community has paid continuous attention to the nexus of agriculture and climate change, and mitigation and adaptation strategies to cope with climatic shocks (Zhang et al., 2020a, Zhang et al., 2020b). A large number of studies consider specific adaptation practices in the agricultural sector, such as diversified crop, mixed crop-livestock farming systems, changing farming dates, resistant varieties (Bradshaw et al., 2004, Tong et al., 2017, Li et al., 2020). Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) has been proposed to achieve agricultural productivity, resilience, and reduce greenhouse gases emissions (GHGs). To achieve these goals, climate-smart agricultural practices (CSAPs) have been explored and implemented world widely (Lipper et al., 2014, Tong et al., 2017), particularly in achieving agricultural productivity and reducing GHGs. On the other hand, efforts have also been made to build resilience to climate change. For example, insurance is gaining importance in providing opportunities to improve climate risk management in developing countries (Surminski et al., 2016), among which crop insurance can help to improve agricultural productivity (Panda et al., 2013). However, one of the limitations of these studies is that they have made efforts into different types of adaptation practices in agriculture but limited research has been done in revealing farmers’ health risk management when coping with climate change.