Livestock farmers’ perception and adaptation to climate change: panel evidence from pastoral areas in China

As the world’s largest land use sector, livestock farming is vulnerable to climate change. This study adds to existing literature by investigating the impacts of herders’ climate change perceptions on adaptive strategies and distinguishing between the short-run and long-run effects. We use double-hurdle models and an unbalanced panel dataset of 1514 household observations collected from the pastoral areas of Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet for the period of 2016–2018. We find that perceptions of long-term temperature and rainfall changes lead farmers to adopt various adaptive strategies, whereas perceptions of short-term weather hazards mainly trigger production management strategies such as forage supplementation and herd destocking, without affecting long-term strategic planning such as engaging in non-agricultural jobs to diversify income sources. The findings that livestock farmers tend to adopt temporary strategies under short-term perceptions while seeking more resilient adaptations under long-term perceptions are robust, based on alternative measures for adaptation intensity and under different production scales. An understanding of these strategies provides a means of influencing the adaptive responses of vulnerable groups.