Farmers’ drought experience, risk perceptions, and behavioural intentions for adaptation: evidence from Ethiopia

ABSTRACT

This paper examines farmers' cognitive perceptions of risk and the behavioural intentions to implement specific drought risk reduction measures using the Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) model. We follow an innovative route by extending a PMT model with a drought experience variable, which, we hypothesize, will influence risk perceptions and the take-up of adaptation measures. In order to do so, we investigated detailed historical drought patterns by looking at the spatial and temporal aspects of drought conditions during crop growing season at the village level. In our extended PMT model, drought experience, as represented by a long-term Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), plays a significant role in predicting farmers' intention to take up adaptation measures. The result reveals that drier conditions significantly increase farmers' behavioural intention to implement adaptation measures against drought risk, which is the key finding of the study. Moreover, our findings show that perceived vulnerability and severity, self-efficacy, and response efficacy are positively and significantly associated with the number of drought risk reduction measures implemented. The findings of our empirical analysis contribute to the effect of cognitive perceptions through a new lens of farmer's personal experience with drought shocks, represented by the state of vegetation or physical environment.

Keywords:

• Drought
• risk perception
• protection motivation theory
• NDVI
• adaptation

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the editor and two anonymous referees for their valuable comments and suggestions. They appreciate the survey households for their willingness to participate in this study. However, the authors alone are responsible for the ideas expressed in the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This study used one of the most widely recognized definitions of adaptation by Adger & co-authors, where adaptation is defined as a process of deliberate change in response to external stimuli and changes that affect people’s lives (Adger et al., 2006)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tagel Gebrehiwot

Tagel Gebrehiwot (PhD) is Center Director and a senior research fellow at the Environment and Climate Research Center (ECRC). His field of expertise include climate vulnerability assessments and farm level adaptation to climate change, environmental impact assessment, policy impact evaluation, poverty and food security analysis, and agricultural insurance and risk management.

Anne van der Veen

Anne van der Veen is Em. Professor at the University of Twente, the Netherlands with two chairs: Professor of Governance and Spatial Integrated Assessment, International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, Enschede Professor of Spatial Economics, Department of Water Engineering and Management Faculty of Engineering Technology, Enschede. His main research interests are in risk management, environmental impact assessment, monetary valuation of nature, integrated assessment.