Climate change and the agricultural sector in Ireland: examining farmer awareness and willingness to adopt new advisory mitigation tools

ABSTRACT

Agriculture is responsible for the bulk of Ireland’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, the potential to mitigate some of these emissions through the adoption of more efficient farm management practices may be hampered by farmers’ awareness and attitude towards climate change and agriculture’s role in contributing to GHG emissions. This paper presents results from a survey of 746 Irish farmers in 2014, with a view to understanding farmers’ awareness of, and attitudes to, climate change and GHG emissions. Survey results show that there was a general uncertainty towards a number of questions related to agricultural GHG emissions, e.g. if tilling of land causes GHG emissions, and that farmers were reluctant to take action to reduce GHG emissions on their farm. To further explore farmers’ attitudes towards climate change, a multinomial logit model was used to examine the socio-economic factors that affect farmers’ willingness to adopt an advisory tool that would show the potential reduction in GHG emissions from the adoption of new technologies. Results show that farmers’ awareness of human-induced global climate change was positively related to the tool’s adoption.

Key policy insights

• Irish farmers are generally not sufficiently aware of the impact of their activities on climate change.

• A quarter of farmers believed that climate change will only impact on their business in the long-term; such an attitude may lead to a reluctance amongst these farmers to adopt management practices that reduce GHG emissions.

• Awareness of climate change affects positively the adoption of new tools to reduce GHG emissions on farmers’ farms.

• IT literacy affects willingness to adopt new tools to address GHG emissions.

• Reception of agri-environmental advice can have a positive influence on farmers’ willingness to adopt new GHG emission abatement tools.

• Farmers in receipt of environmental subsidies are more likely to adopt new abatement tools, either because they are more environmentally conscious or because the subsidy raised their environmentally consciousness.

• Willingness to adopt differs between different farm enterprises; operating dairy enterprise increases the willingness to adopt new advisory mitigation tools.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• technology adoption
• awareness
• advisory tool

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Sectors outside the EU ETS include agriculture, transport, residential, commercial, waste and non-energy intensive industry.

2. Every year in addition to the Irish National Farm Survey, Teagasc conducts a supplementary survey focusing on certain topics, and creating opportunities for new studies based on a representative sample of farmers.

3. Teagsc is the Irish state agency providing research, advice and education in the agricultural sector.

4. The supplementary survey is carried out as a once off survey during the autumn and due to unavailability of some farmers during this period the sample for the supplementary survey is smaller than the main NFS.

5. An example of one such advisory tool is the Teagasc carbon navigator. This is an advisory tool that was developed to assist in explaining to farmers the range of abatement technologies available and the potential emissions reduction achievable from the adoption of these technologies. The carbon navigator was not referenced specifically in the question in order to avoid any confusion, as it is possible that some of the farmers would be unfamiliar with the term or they may already be using a similar tool to quantify their GHG emissions and we did not want to preclude them as a result.

6. Enteric fermentation, manure management and nitrogen application to agricultural soils account for on average 45%, 27% and 22%, respectively of total emissions from agriculture.

7. Energy and fuel emissions per litre of milk produced on a dairy farm is on average 0.06 CO₂ equivalent while total emissions are 0.86 kg CO₂ equivalent per litre of milk. A cattle farm emits 9.8 kg CO₂ equivalent per kg beef while an average of 0.58 kg CO₂ are energy-based emissions per kg beef. Similarly, in other farm types energy-based emissions are very low compared with the total on farm emissions (Lynch et al., 2016).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Environmental Protection Agency [grant number 2012-CCRP-PhD.1].