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Tropentag 2022, September 14 - 16, Prague, Germany

"Can agroecological farming feed the world? Farmers' and academia's views."


Determinants of climate change perception accuracy: Cross-county evidence from Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Mongolia

Begaiym Emileva, Lena Kuhn, Ihtiyor Bobojonov, Thomas Glauben

Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies (IAMO), Agricultural Markets, Germany


Abstract


Drought is a major threat to farmers in semi-arid and arid regions and its intensity is increasing under the global warming. Individual perception about climate risks may play important role in adopting mitigation and adaptation measures but international experience shows that individual perception might fundamentally deviate from objective changes. So far, little attention has been paid in the literature to understand farmers' accurate perceptions drought and its actual occurrence.
On the other hand, with growing literature on smartphone technology usage in agriculture, there is a scare literature on the role of smartphone-based weather acquisition on accurate risk perception. Thus, the understanding the role of smartphone-based weather information acquisition on accurate agricultural drought perception can help policymakers, researchers and weather-service developers to integrate smartphone-based applications for agricultural drought mitigation.
Therefore, this study aims at filling these gaps by analyzing: 1) the discrepancy between farmers' subjective perceptions of drought occurrence and actual drought occurrence and: 2) the role of smartphone-based weather acquisition on accurate drought perception.
The analysis was based on a cross-sectional dataset of 2830 observations collected in Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia and Uzbekistan in 2021, areas in which the incidence of drought has intensified in these regions over the recent decades.
SPEI index was used to measure meteorological drought occurrence and the impact of smartphone-based weather information acquisition on accurate drought perception was measured by Propensity score matching. The results of SPEI based assessment showed that 33 percent in Kyrgyzstan, 68 percent in Mongolia and 54 percent in Uzbekistan and accurately meteorological drought occurrence. The results of the Kernel matching (PSM) estimate indicated that smartphone-based weather information acquisition significantly influences the perception of drought accurately in Kyrgyz and Mongolian samples, and insignificantly in Uzbek sample.


Keywords: Drought risk perception, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, SPEI, smartphone-based weather information, Uzbekistan


Contact Address: Begaiym Emileva, Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies (IAMO), Agricultural Markets, Theodor-Lieser-Str. 2, 06120 Halle (Saale), Germany, e-mail: emileva@iamo.de


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