A systematic review of scientific research focused on farmers in agricultural adaptation to climate change (2008-2017)

Due to the severe consequences of climate change, associated risks to global food security, and the contribution of agriculture to greenhouse gas emissions, agriculture must necessarily adapt to meet these challenges. Many studies have therefore sought to investigate agricultural adaptation to climate change, and as key stakeholders in agriculture, farmers play a vital role in this process. There is a rapidly increasing corpus of scholarship on agricultural adaptation to climate change, with many studies beginning to incorporate survey methods to examine farmer perceptions and adaptation responses. Nevertheless, in-depth understanding of farmers worldwide is inadequate due to insufficiently robust methodologies, socio-economic disparities, and unequal geographic distribution. In this study, we searched and reviewed the existing peer-reviewed, English-language scientific articles published between 2008 and 2017 on agricultural adaptation to climate change that have incorporated farmers into their research methodologies. The main findings include the following: (1) a small but increasing number of studies focus on farmers in climate change adaptation; (2) the global geographic distribution of the reviewed studies is uneven, and many of the most vulnerable nations (e.g., lower-income/agricultural-dependent economies) have no representation at all; (3) there were diverse rationales and methods for incorporating farmers into the studies, and many of the methodological differences were due to practical and logistical limitations in lower-income/agricultural-dependent nations; and (4) studies were from multiple academic fields, indicating the need for more interdisciplinary collaboration moving forward because agricultural adaptation to climate change is too complex for a single discipline to fully explore. Although English is increasingly recognized as the “international language of science,” due to the challenge of language segmentation limiting broader understanding of global scholarship whenever possible, future reviews should be jointly conducted in both English and non-English languages.