Abstract
Despite there being considerable research and knowledge surrounding the risks of climate change on agricultural productivity, fewer studies have examined risks from a whole-of-chain perspective (i.e. from producer to consumer) and the perceptions of consumers about the climate adaptation strategies of food businesses. This paper presents the findings of a survey of 1532 Australian consumers and how they might respond to a food company’s climate adaptation strategy. Three respondent archetypes, ‘Eco-warriors’ (n = 557), ‘Undecideds’ (n = 600) and ‘Abdicators’ (n = 375), were identified based on their perceptions of risks associated with climate change and their attitudes towards climate adaptation. Further analysis was carried out to understand how each group of respondents would respond to adaptation strategies employed by food companies. Based on the findings of this study, two main challenges are presented for food value chains: (1) translating consumer needs and preferences to niche opportunities arising from adaptation and (2) understanding how best to communicate adaptation benefits based on varying attitudes and information needs. By addressing these challenges, synergies between adaptation goals and competitive strategies in food value chains may be achieved.
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Notes
In Australia, males are more likely to obtain TAFE qualifications than females (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2012).
Evidence suggests that climate change belief and denial is not as clear-cut as it seems to be (Leviston and Walker 2013; Greenhill et al. 2014) and that belief represents something that is deeper in an individual’s ideological structure. The issue of perceptions of coping in relation to belief lies in the link between perceived risk of climate change impacts and adaptive capacity (Grothmann and Patt 2005). This research addresses the issue raised by Leviston in multiple publications (Leviston and Walker 2013; Greenhill et al. 2014; Walker and Leviston 2015), in that future research should take into account more nuanced forms of climate change belief and denial by allowing for the complexity of human thinking to surface in the context of a challenging issue.
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Acknowledgments
This project received funding by the Australian Government Department of Agriculture ‘Filling the Research Gap’ Funding Program, Grant No. 1194456-215. We thank Amanda Hawes and Josephine Ung of Colmar Brunton for their data collection services, Prof. Ray Collins, Dr. Anne-Maree Dowd and Dr. Nadine Marshall for internally reviewing this article, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.
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Ethics approval was obtained from the CSIRO Social Science Human Research Ethics Committee (reference number 080/13). Respondents provided informed consent prior to participating in the survey.
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Lim-Camacho, L., Ariyawardana, A., Lewis, G.K. et al. Climate adaptation of food value chains: the implications of varying consumer acceptance. Reg Environ Change 17, 93–103 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-016-0976-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-016-0976-5