US farmers’ adaptations to climate change: a systematic review of adaptation-focused studies in the US agriculture context

Abstract

Farmers in the US are adopting a range of strategies to deal with climate change impacts, from changing planting dates to using sophisticated technologies. Studies on farmers’ adaptation in US agriculture focus on a variety of topics and provide an understanding of how farmers adapt to climate change impacts, which adaptation strategies offer better outcomes, and what challenges need to be addressed for effective adaptations. Nevertheless, we lack a comprehensive view of adaptation studies focusing on US farmers’ adaptations. A review of the adaptation studies in US agriculture will help us to understand current research trends and realize future research potential. To fulfill this gap, this study systematically reviewed peer-reviewed studies on adaptation to climate change in US agriculture. A systematic search on the Web of Science and Google Scholar platforms generated 95 articles for final review. These studies were categorized under five themes based on their topical relevance: i) reporting on-farm adaptations, ii) exploring potential adaptations, iii) evaluating specific adaptations, iv) challenges of adaptations, and v) perceptions toward adaptations. A skewed distribution of studies under these themes has been observed; a majority of the studies focused on evaluating specific adaptations (47%) followed by exploring potential adaptations (22%), while reporting on-farm adaptations (17%), challenges of adaptations (6%), and perception towards adaptations (8%) received less attention. In this article, key findings under each theme were presented and some areas for future research focus were broadly discussed. These findings indicate the need for more attention to documenting on-farm adaptation strategies and the associated challenges while emphasizing other themes.

Promising Nature-Based Solutions to Support Climate Adaptation of Arizona’s Local Food Entrepreneurs and Optimize One Health

“…This list is not exhaustive and NbS such as cover crops and diversified crop rotations are already widely used practices in sustainable farming. US farmers are undertaking five broad categories of climate adaptation strategies based on NbS: water management, crop management, nutrient management, technological management, and financial management [62]. Our study has shown that many small-scale farmers, ranchers, and other LFE-types are familiar with and practicing NbS.…”

“…[5,11,13,22,62,63] Pathway 2: Peer-to-peer (P2P) and Expert-to-peer (E2P) knowledge co-creation and exchange LFEs possess a keen awareness of weather patterns and climatic conditions that affect them on a daily basis. They continuously adapt to changes in both short-term and long-term weather and climate variability.…”

Adaptation of Agriculture to Climate Change: A Scoping Review

“…The literature review shows that a comprehensive discussion has unfolded in the scientific community on the global impact of climate change and adaptation to it on various aspects of human life [19,27,28,37,38,43,[49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56]. The multiple attempts are devoted to research involving systematic analysis, categorization and documentation of agricultural adaptation as a whole [23,25,32,39,45,[57][58][59], as well some specific aspects, such as adaptation features in different countries and regions of the world, e.g.,: the Mediterranean region [60], Eastern Europe [61], Nordic countries [33], the USA [62], Canada [39], developing countries [63], low-and middle-income countries [42], Asia [64][65][66], South Asia [67], African countries [11,18,68], arid and semi-arid tropics of Asia, Africa, and Latin America [69]; in various sectors of agriculture [70], depending on the effects for various crops [71][72][73][74][75]…”