Current Research
Pro-Social Preferences and Subsistence Farmer Climate Risk Management
with Matthias Wildmeersch, Fernando P. Santos, Simon A. Levin, Michael Opennheimer, and Elke U Weber.
Summary
Several governments have tested formal index-based insurance to build climate resilience among smallholder farmers. Yet, adoption of such programs has generated concerns that insurance may crowd out long-established informal risk transfer arrangements. Understanding this phenomenon requires new analytic approaches that capture dynamics of human social behaviour when facing risky events. Here, we develop a modelling framework, based on evolutionary game theory and empirical data from Nepal and Ethiopia, to demonstrate that insurance may introduce a new social dilemma in farmer risk management strategies. We find that while socially optimal risk management is achieved when all farmers pursue a combination of formal and informal risk transfer, a community of self-interested agents is unable to maintain this coexistence at moderate to high covariate risks. We find that a combination of pro-social preferences - namely, moderate altruism and solidarity - helps farmers overcome these concerns and achieve the social optimum. Behavioural interventions that cue such preferences can render financial incentives more efficient in promoting optimal climate risk management, with potential savings worth approximately 5-15 percent of community agricultural income under a range of risk levels. Extreme dry events already disrupt populations’ ability to migrate. In a warming climate, compound drought events could amplify vulnerability and drive forced migration. Here, we contribute the first multi-method research design on societal impacts from compound drought events. We show how mobility patterns are shaped by the intersection of drought and social vulnerability factors in three drought-prone countries – Madagascar, Nepal, and Mexico. We find that internal migration in agricultural communities in Mexico increased by 14 to 24 basis points from 1991 to 2018 and will prospectively increase by 2 to 15 basis points in Nepal in case of a compound drought event in 2025. We show that consecutive drought events exacerbate structural vulnerabilities, limiting migrants’ adaptation options, including long-range migration. We conclude that the additional social pre-conditions, e.g., social isolation and lack of accurate information, ultimately limit migration as an adaptation option for households vulnerable to compound drought events.An early version of this paper was designated as a 2022 Allianz Climate Risk Award Finalist!
How Do Information and Social Capital Affect Smallholder Farmer Livelihood Risk Perceptions?
with Dirgha Ghimire, Michael Oppenheimer, Rajendra Ghimire, Indra Chaudhaury, and Dil CK
Summary
Increasing climate risks are likely to threaten the livelihoods of many of the world’s 500 million smallholder farming households. Previous scholarship has demonstrated that access to accurate climate information may enhance farmers’ adaptive capacity, including adaptive rural-urban migration, but evidence is mixed on how farmers actually integrate such information in their decision-making. In this study, we analyze how farmers’ information sources, social networks, and previous exposure to hazards shape climate risk perceptions and livelihood decisions. Informed by the New Economics of Labour Migration, Protection Motivation Theory, and Security-Potential Aspiration frameworks, we collected data from 500 households in Nepal’s Chitwan Valley on farmers’ livelihood choices from 2015-2021, climate risk perceptions, and access to informational and social capital. We find that climate risks are highly salient to farmers' perception of general livelihood risks, including non-farm livelihoods. The effects of climate on perceived risks of non-farm livelihoods, including migration and off-farm labor, may be one factor tempering adaptation responses to climate hazards. For some hazards, including droughts and groundwater risks, access to greater informational and social capital may decrease risk perceptions, but also contribute to an increased propensity to adopt adaptation strategies. Finally, we find that while farming households generally maintain diversified income portfolios, they tend to rely even more on perceived high-risk strategies during climate-driven shocks. Our results indicate that efforts to build farmers' resilience should especially account for risk perceptions of livelihood alternatives and loss-averse behavior in response to income shocks.I have presented this paper at the 2022 Wittgenstein Centre and 2023 Population Association of America conferences.
Robust Climate Adaptation Policies for Subsistence Agriculture
with Frank Errickson, Michael Oppenheimer, and Anil Babu Pokhrel
Summary
Farmers make livelihood decisions in deeply uncertain environments regarding weather conditions, economic markets, and the social-political systems in which they operate. In turn, uncertainty in how farmers make such decisions challenges the ability of policymakers at multiple governance scales to achieve key objectives such as maximizing economic growth, minimizing inequality, ensuring food security, and limiting rates of outmigration. Farming households and policymakers must therefore make climate adaptation decisions under exogenous sources of deep uncertainty, e.g. unknown probability distributions of climatic and economic states of the world, and endogenous deep uncertainty resulting from misalignment or misunderstanding of objectives among key stakeholders in a system. Here, we propose an integrated robust decision-making – agent-based model (RDM-ABM) framework to analyze how both types of deep uncertainty affect the robustness of potential climate adaptation policy interventions in the agricultural sector of Nepal. Our work expands on a previous analysis of smallholder farmer livelihood decisions under climate risk by incorporating endogenous feedbacks between policymakers at multiple levels of government, international development agencies, and farming households. We apply this framework to investigate how real-world complexities of the policymaking process – including potentially competing objectives, misalignment between scales of policymaking, and lags in policy implementation – affects the robustness of proposed climate adaptation policies for subsistence agriculture in Nepal.I have presented this paper at the 2022 Society for Decision-Making under Deep Uncertainty Conference.