Purpose The purpose of this study is to explore the effects of climate information intervention on farmers' tendency to adopt climate adaptation strategies in agricultural production. Design/methodology/approach A randomized controlled trial is used to conduct two types of climate information interventions through short-form videos, and then data from farmers in the control and treatment groups are collected. The negative binomial regression model is employed to analyze the impact of climate information intervention on farmers' adoption willingness of climate adaptation strategies. The mediating effect model is applied to further detect the mediating role of farmers' cognition between climate information intervention and farmers' adoption willingness. Findings The results show that: (1) The average adoption willingness intensity in treatment group CII (crop-specific information intervention) is 29.48% higher than that in the control group. For treatment group GII (general information intervention), the average adoption willingness is 27.94% higher than that of the control group. (2) Two types of climate information interventions significantly influenced farmers' willingness to adopt climate adaptation strategies. In particular, the incidence rate ratio (IRR) of CII group indicates that farmers receiving CII showed a 55.3% higher adoption willingness compared to those who did not receive interventions. Similarly, the IRR of GII group suggests that farmers exposed to the GII had a 53.7% higher adoption willingness than those who did not receive interventions. (3) Climate cognition plays an important mediating role between information interventions and farmers' adoption willingness of climate adaptation strategies. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study first attempts to conduct two types of climate information interventions (CII and GII) using emerging short-form videos, which are more acceptable to smallholder farmers. This study also provides new evidence to reveal how climate information intervention affects farmers' adoption willingness of climate adaptation strategies.
Huang et al. (Sat,) studied this question.