Climate change uncertainty among American farmers: an examination of multi-dimensional uncertainty and attitudes towards
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Climate change uncertainty among American farmers: an examination of multi-dimensional uncertainty and attitudes towards agricultural adaptation to climate change Ajay S. Singh 1
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& Francis Eanes & Linda S. Prokopy
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Received: 5 February 2020 / Accepted: 30 August 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
A large survey of corn farmers in twelve US midwestern states (n = 6849) was used to determine the role of multiple dimensions of uncertainty on prior experience with climate change, attitudes towards climate adaptation, and use of climate outlooks in agricultural decision-making. Epistemic uncertainty refers to a perception about the level of information about a phenomenon. Aleatoric uncertainty is a perception that a phenomenon occurs at random and no new information will reduce uncertainty while response uncertainty refers to the perception of the efficacy of an action to reduce a risk. Epistemic and response uncertainty explained a large portion of variance of farmers’ attitudes towards adaptation and their willingness to use weather and climate outlook tools. Aleatoric uncertainty however did not add or added only a small portion of variance explaining farmers’ attitudes climate adaptation or use of climate tools. Our results indicate that climate scientists should not treat farmers’ uncertainty as a monolithic concept, but instead embrace its multidimensionality. We also suggest that reception of expert-led presentations or tools that have a lot of modeling data, which are often layered with statistical uncertainty, can negatively influence farmers’ model uncertainty. Keywords Climate change . Climate adaptation . Uncertainty . Climate communication . Agriculture . Food security
* Ajay S. Singh [email protected] Francis Eanes [email protected] Linda S. Prokopy [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
Climatic Change
1 Introduction Though agriculture is one of the largest sectoral contributors of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, it is also one of the most vulnerable to future climatic shifts (IPCC 2015; NRC 2010). Global climate change poses significant challenges to future agricultural production, with significant implications for global food security, agricultural producer livelihoods, and environmental degradation (Foley et al. 2011; Beddington et al. 2012). Domestically, climate change in the USA over the next 30 years alone could have large impacts on agricultural productivity, due to a high likelihood of an overall warming trend, increased nighttime temperatures, increased frost-free days, increased frequency of extreme weather events (e.g., precipitation intensity, heat waves, droughts), and more variable precipitation (Hatfield et al. 2011; Huang and Khanna 2010; Melillo et al. 2014). In the productive US Corn Belt region consisting of twelve midwestern US states (henceforth Corn Belt), evidence points to potentially significant decreases in corn and soybean yields under warmer and drier scenarios (e.g., Kucharik and Serbin 2008; Schlenke
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