Household farms facing barriers in indigenous knowledge-based adaptation to extreme climatic events — Evidence from the Huangshui Basin

Abstract

Global warming has led to the frequent occurrence of extreme climatic events (ECEs) in the ecologically fragile Qinghai-Xizang Plateau. Rural households face strong barriers in adaption, and food production is seriously threatened. Current methods for increasing household adaptability take a holistic point of view, but do not accurately identify groups experiencing different adaptive barriers. To better identify different barriers, this paper examines natural, economic, cognitive, and technical barriers. A total of 17 indicators were selected to comprehensively evaluate the degree of barriers to crops adaptation in response to ECEs. Key factors were further analyzed to identify paths to break down the barriers. The results showed the following. (1) Natural barriers were present at the highest degree, economic barriers appear to be smallest, and the overall barriers were biased towards the lower quartile. 10.82 % of the households with the highest barriers. (2) 67.38 % of households report taking adaptive measures in crops production. The increase of the barriers leads to an increase and then a decrease in the possibility of adaptive behavior. (3) Addressing technical barriers is key to rapidly increasing household adaptive behavior in response to ECEs. The study provides recommendations for local governments to improve household adaptation behavior from two perspectives: short-term and long-term optimization pathways. This study can help governments quickly locate households with different classes of barriers, and propose more targeted adaptation policies. The ultimate goal is to ensure the sustainability of crops production and the well-being of households in northeastern part of the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau.

Keywords

Barrier degree evaluation / Extreme climatic events / Indigenous knowledge / Household adaptive behavior / Qinghai-xizang plateau / Huangshui basin

Ethical statement

Ethical approval was not required for this study since human participants were ensured following local legislation and institutional requirements. All proceeds of this research were carried out following the Helsinki Declaration principles of human subject investigation. Participation in this survey was anonymous and voluntary, assuring consent of prospective respondents before participation.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Hailin Zhang: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Visualization, Software, Methodology, Investigation, Conceptualization. Jinyan Zhan: Writing – review & editing, Validation, Supervision, Project administration, Data curation, Conceptualization. Zheng Yang: Writing – review & editing, Data curation. Huihui Wang: Software, Data curation. Naikang Xu: Visualization, Data curation. Chunyue Bai: Writing – review & editing, Data curation. Yufei He: Writing – review & editing, Software. Yuhan Cao: Writing – review & editing, Visualization.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the Second Scientific Expedition to the Qinghai‒Xizang Plateau (Grant No. 2019QZKK0405–05) and methodological support from the State Key Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 72033005) is also appreciated greatly.

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2024.07.007.

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