Farmers’ drought experience, risk perceptions, and behavioural intentions for adaptation: evidence from Ethiopia

This paper examines farmers’ cognitive perceptions of risk and the behavioral intentions to implement specific drought risk reduction measures using the Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) model. We follow an innovative route by extending a PMT model with a drought experience variable, which, we hypothesize, will influence risk perceptions and the take-up of adaptation measures. In order to do so, we investigated detailed historical drought patterns by looking at the spatial and temporal aspects of drought conditions during crop growing season at the village level. In our extended PMT model, drought experience, as represented by a long-term Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), plays a significant role in predicting farmers’ intention to take up adaptation measures. The result reveals that drier conditions significantly increase farmers’ behavioral intention to implement adaptation measures against drought risk, which is the key finding of the study. Moreover, our findings show that perceived vulnerability and severity, self-efficacy, and response efficacy are positively and significantly associated with the number of drought risk reduction measures implemented. The findings of our empirical analysis contribute to the effect of cognitive perceptions through a new lens of farmer’s personal experience with drought shocks, represented by the state of vegetation or physical environment.