A meta-analysis of agricultural conservation intentions, behaviors, and practices: Insights from 35 years of quantitative literature in the United States

Motivating factors of farmers' adaptation behaviors to climate change in China: A meta-analysis

Adapting to climate change is critical to building sustainable and resilient agricultural systems. Understanding farmers' perceptions of climate change has become the key to the effective implementation of climate change adaptation policies. This research draws multidisciplinary attention to how farmers participate in decision-making on adaptation behaviors and provides useful insights for realizing synergies between environmental change and agricultural production. In this work, we conducted a meta-analysis of 63 quantitative studies on Chinese farmers' adaptation to climate change to assess the relationship between motivational factors and adaptation behavior. Our analysis highlights that farmers' perceptions of precipitation changes are often inaccurate; however, other psychological factors, such as perception, experience, and risk attitude, significantly positively impact their adaptation behavior. In addition, different climate regions are the main source of high heterogeneity in inter-study comparisons of climate change perception, and the effect of climate regions may therefore constitute a moderating factor that weakens the positive relationship between climate change perception and adaptive behavior. Furthermore, this study highlights the need to intervene at the household level to enhance farmers' adaptability to climate change, which includes providing support through income diversification, early warning information services, training, assistance, credit, subsidies, and other resources. In the future, research on how perception, experience, and risk interact to affect adaptive behavior should be strengthened.

Conservation Agriculture Impacts on Economic Profitability and Environmental Performance of Agroecosystems

The rationale of this study originates from the primary sector's multiple roles in the global warming issue. Agriculture is reported among the main causes of anthropogenic global warming. At the same time, it is profoundly impacted by climate change and concurrently holds potential as a solution through the sequestration of soil organic carbon (SOC) facilitated by Conservation Agriculture (CA). However, the findings in the literature are controversial on the SOC sequestration capacity and the profitability of CA implementation. Considering the new and old objectives of the sector, this paper tackles the assessment of the actual capabilities of CA to be a viable strategy to pursue the social good of climate change mitigation and concurrently be profitable for farmers. The economic profitability and environmental performance of CA are assessed analysing data from a field experiment in Northern Italy (European temperate area) and identifying the best management practice by means of a data envelopment analysis.

Energy productivity and GHG emission in the european agriculture: The club convergence approach

The agricultural production plays an important role in food provision and income generation for the rural population. To mitigate the climate change and ensure food security, the agricultural sector has faced multiple initiatives, including the European Green Deal. Developing effective frameworks for measures under such initiatives requires identifying reasonable benchmarks. Accordingly, it is important to assess the patterns of input use and productivity in the agricultural sector. This paper focuses on the agricultural energy productivity in the European Union (EU) Member States during 2005-2019. Indeed, the EU allocates substantial support to improve resource efficiency and reduce climate pressures in the agriculture. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to apply the club convergence approach for the energy productivity the EU agriculture. This particular approach allows identifying the homogenous groups of the EU countries and, subsequently, assess the dynamics of the agricultural energy productivity within these groups. The results indicate that the agricultural energy productivity still requires attention in the EU countries, as only partial convergence was observed during 2015-2019. The EU countries were grouped into five clusters with different levels of the agricultural energy productivity. The results imply that the differences among resulting clusters remained rather stable over time. Therefore, relevant policies addressing energy efficiency issues can be developed for these relatively homogeneous groups to ensure further cohesion. The results suggest that countries with high energy productivity may show high levels of greenhouse gas intensity (and low levels of, e.g., labour productivity). Therefore, energy conservation and introduction of clean energy is a complex task that can be guided by the proposed framework and adjustment in the Common Agricultural Policy measures.