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Farmers Prone to Drought Risk: Why Some Farmers Undertake Farm-Level Risk-Reduction Measures While Others Not?

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Abstract

This research investigates farmers’ cognitive perceptions of risk and the behavioral intentions to undertake farm-level risk-reduction measures. It has been observed that people who are susceptible to natural hazards often fail to act, or do very little, to protect their assets or lives. To answer the question of why some people show adaptive behavior while others do not, a socio-psychological model of precautionary adaptation based on protection motivation theory and trans-theoretical stage model has been applied for the first time to areas of drought risk in the developing countries cultural context. The applicability of the integrated model is explored by means of a representative sample survey of smallholder farmers in northern Ethiopia. The result of the study showed that there is a statistically significant association between farmer’s behavioral intention to undertake farm-level risk-reduction measures and the main important protection motivation model variables. High perceived vulnerability, severity of consequences, self-efficacy, and response efficacy lead to higher levels of behavioral intentions to undertake farm-level risk-reduction measures. For farmers in the action stage, self-efficacy and response efficacy were the main motivators of behavioral intention. For farmers in the contemplative stage, self-efficacy and cost appear to be the main motivators for them to act upon risk reduction, while perceived severity of consequences and cost of response actions were found to be important for farmers in the pre-contemplative stage.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the editor and two anonymous referees for their valuable comments and suggestions. We 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.

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  1. Laboratory for Social Interactions and Economic Behaviour (LSEB), University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7514 AE, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Tagel Gebrehiwot

  2. Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7514 AE, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Anne van der Veen

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Gebrehiwot, T., van der Veen, A. Farmers Prone to Drought Risk: Why Some Farmers Undertake Farm-Level Risk-Reduction Measures While Others Not?. Environmental Management 55, 588–602 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-014-0415-7

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