Coping with drought risk

In the perspective of increasing droughts risks because of climate change, adaptation is key to decrease farmer’s vulnerability and to secure the agricultural sector’s performance at the aggregate level. Using the results of a recent survey, we explore farmers’ adaptive behaviour to drought in the south-west Netherlands.

We show that behavioural factors make a significant contribution to explain the actual level of farmers’ adaptation motivation. Furthermore, we find that components of threat and coping appraisal influence adoption decisions differently across the three types of drought adaptation measures: responses at the field scale, farm-level measures and joint adaptation measures.