To what extent are the rural households _ carbon capable _ ? Evidence from a survey at Jianghan Plain, central China

Abstract

Although farmers’ active involvement is crucial to agricultural greenhouse gas emission reduction, an informed understanding of farmers’ ability to engage in climate change mitigation is lacking in the literature. In this study, we delineate an actor-centred, capability-based and multi-dimensional framework to elucidate in which aspect and to what extent farmers are equipped to engage in climate change mitigation. This framework relates farmers’ internal driving capability, cognitive level capability, behavioural control capability, behavioural level capability (including behavioural capability of farming and behavioural capability of socialising) and influence capability to their carbon capability. A structural equation model combined with survey data collected from 852 farmers in China is utilised to explore the structural relationships among the carbon capability constructs. The findings indicate that farmers’ intrapsychic constructs are very pro-environmental, and their cognitive knowledge about pro-climate farming practices is at a moderate level. However, the performance of pro-climate farming is largely not under farmers’ behavioural control. Farmers generally have a low tendency to perform stable pro-climate farming behaviours, while they are a little more inclined to perform environmentally-friendly in social interactions. Moreover, farmers’ behavioural control capability emerges as the strongest predictor of behavioural capability of farming, which, in turn, is an essential prerequisite for both behavioural capability of socialising and influence capability.