Assessing the awareness of climate change as a factor of adaptation in the agricultural sector

The paper describes results obtained investigating the problems of adaptation to climate change of Italian agriculture. It specify a choice process that explicitly considers that farmers base their planning on an awareness of the inherent variability in the climatic conditions of their territories. The expectations on climatic variables, and the consequent conditions for crop, are represented under various hypotheses of climate stability, or cognition of a change achieved by observing the current weather conditions, or even in full knowledge of the actual probability distributions of climate events. The choices due to those expectations are simulated with a model of Discrete Stochastic Programming. The results suggest that it may be interesting to better investigate the hypothesis that, even in a relatively short time and, especially, already in the current period, are in place climate changes significant for the agricultural activities, especially when poor of water resource and in marginal areas. Failure to understand these changes can lead farmers to a wrong choices: on one hand, may prevent from taking advantage of existing opportunities for income improvements,; on the other hand, may induce farmers to misconceptions on the way to defend from the negative effects of climate change. This suggests that among the most effective strategies for adapting to climate change, there is support for farmers to improve their ability to assess the new and changing climate framework.