气候变化领域集成服务门户(CCPortal): Farmer forecasts: Impacts of seasonal rainfall expectations on agricultural decision-making in Sub-Saharan Africa

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DOI	10.1016/j.crm.2020.100247
	Farmer forecasts: Impacts of seasonal rainfall expectations on agricultural decision-making in Sub-Saharan Africa
	Guido Z.; Zimmer A.; Lopus S.; Hannah C.; Gower D.; Waldman K.; Krell N.; Sheffield J.; Caylor K.; Evans T.
发表日期	2020
ISSN	2212-0963
起始页码	2715
结束页码	2728
卷号	30
英文摘要	Seasonal climate variability frequently undermines farm yields, reduces food availability, and lowers income. This is particularly evident among small-scale agricultural producers in both irrigated and non-irrigated agroecosystems in the Global South where maize cultivars constitute a critical component of food production. In these systems, farmers make climate-sensitive decisions that include the selection of late- and/or early-maturing seed varieties, the diversity of seed varieties sown, and when to plant. Farmers’ expectations of future rainfall would therefore seem to be critical determinants of agricultural outcomes and foreshadow climate impacts. However, few studies have quantified the linkages between on-farm decisions and farmer seasonal predictions. We report on detailed household and phone surveys of 501 smallholder farmers in central Kenya based on the 2018 growing seasons and expectations for the 2019 March-April-May growing season. We show that farmers’ expectations of the upcoming seasonal rainfall have important associations with selections of seed maturity varieties and the number of maturing varieties farmers expect to plant and less important associations with the seeds’ planting dates. Furthermore, we show that 79% of the farmers form an expectation of the future seasonal climate and about two-thirds of them formed expectations based on a heuristic that connects the past climate to future seasonal conditions. More problematically, one-third of the farmers formed their rainfall expectation based on the prior season, and we show that no such correlation exists in observational data nor is correlation of seasonal rainfall supported by current understanding of climate variability. These results highlight the challenges farmers face in anticipating seasonal rainfall, which has implications for crop diversification and choices to adopt drought tolerant cultivars. The results suggest that farmers’ expectations of upcoming seasonal climate are important measures of farm decision-making. © 2020 The Authors
英文关键词	Agricultural decision-making; Climate information services; Climate perceptions; Maize; Seasonal climate forecasts; Smallholder
来源期刊	Climate Risk Management
文献类型	期刊论文
条目标识符	http://gcip.llas.ac.cn/handle/2XKMVOVA/183168
作者单位	Arizona Institutes of Resilience, University of Arizona, 1064 E. Lowell Street, Tucson, AZ 85719, United States; School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Arizona, 1064 E. Lowell Street, Tucson, AZ 85719, United States; School of Geography and Development, University of Arizona, 1064 E. Lowell Street, Tucson, AZ 85719, United States; Department of Social Sciences, Building 47-19, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA, United States; Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, United States; Department of Geography, Indiana University, 701 E Kirkwood Ave., Bloomington, IN 47405, United States; Department of Geography, University of California, Santa BarbaraCA, United States; School of Geography and Environmental Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	Guido Z.,Zimmer A.,Lopus S.,et al. Farmer forecasts: Impacts of seasonal rainfall expectations on agricultural decision-making in Sub-Saharan Africa[J],2020,30.
APA	Guido Z..,Zimmer A..,Lopus S..,Hannah C..,Gower D..,...&Evans T..(2020).Farmer forecasts: Impacts of seasonal rainfall expectations on agricultural decision-making in Sub-Saharan Africa.Climate Risk Management,30.
MLA	Guido Z.,et al."Farmer forecasts: Impacts of seasonal rainfall expectations on agricultural decision-making in Sub-Saharan Africa".Climate Risk Management 30(2020).