<p>The future success of agriculture
in arid and semi-arid areas globally will be highly dependent on the ability of
farmers and agricultural systems to adapt to climate change. Most of these
areas, though tremendously productive, suffer from the same limiting resource:
water. As that resource becomes more scarce and availability more difficult to
predict, water managers and farmers will be forced to implement new, creative
solutions to water supply challenges. This anticipated exposure suggests that
an improved understanding of agricultural adaptation to water stress in such areas
is critical to successful outcomes in these regions under a changing climate. This
work focuses specifically on the adaptation strategies employed by farmers,
strategies which are determined by farmers’ assessment of their exposure and
sensitivity to a stressor as well as their capacity to implement changes. This
process of implementing change to limit vulnerability is broadly referred to as
adaptation. </p>
<p> This
project focuses on the Eastern Snake Plain of southeastern Idaho as a case
study in agricultural adaptation to increased water stress. The Eastern Snake
Plain (ESP) is a diverse and productive agricultural basin in the
inter-mountain region of the American West. The region’s primary products are potatoes,
sugar beets, barley, and alfalfa, as well as a significant volume of livestock
dominated by dairy cattle, and each of these products forms a significant share
of the total US market for that crop. More than 74% of this agricultural land
is irrigated, inextricably tying both the future of agriculture and the future
of the Idaho economy to water in the state. In the mid-2000’s, legislators and
water managers from across the plain came together to negotiate a new water
rights settlement, now known as the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer Comprehensive
Aquifer Management Plan (CAMP). The negotiations came in response to years of
litigation involving groundwater and surface water conjunctive management in
the region, and the resulting plan was designed to accomplish three goals:
stabilize reach gains in the lower Eastern Snake Plain, replenish Eastern Snake
Plain Aquifer (ESPA) levels, and ensure sustainable water resources for
agricultural, industrial, and domestic users across the basin. Though the water
settlement was not directly caused by climate change, it is likely that water
shortages will become more frequent under climate change, and this settlement
represents a simulation of just such a shortage.</p>
<p>Broadly, this work and the work of
collaborators hope to understand adaptation and decision-making of groundwater
farmers throughout the Eastern Snake Plain as they adapt to the on-average 12.9%
reduction in water availability. This thesis is divided into three primary
sections (Chapters 2, 3, and 4). </p>
<p>Chapter 2 investigates tradeoffs in
adaptation decision making, employing semi-structured interviews to learn more
about tradeoffs as a framework for understanding adaptation more broadly. In
particular, the work seeks to understand the types of tradeoffs present in ESP
adaptation and when and how tradeoffs are implicitly or explicitly
acknowledged. Findings indicate that tradeoffs occur both at the individual and
regional scale and that shifts in crop patterns and irrigation water sourcing
may have important implications for adaptation policy moving forward. </p>
<p>Chapter 3 employs a household
survey and statistical analysis to investigate the iterative and complex
relationships between exposure, adaptive capacity, sensitivity, and
vulnerability. As an early attempt to examine these relationships
quantitatively in the context of US agriculture and water stress, the works
focuses on laying out a clear theoretical and methodological framework for
continued exploration of adaptation and vulnerability in this context. Findings
indicate that under-theorized components of adaptive capacity like linking
capacity and exposure to simultaneous stressors may play important roles in
determining farmer vulnerability in the context of policy-induced water
scarcity. </p>
<p>Chapter 4 is designed to
investigate and develop a novel tool for exploratory work in adaptation,
examining the feasibility and predictive accuracy of an agent-based model of
agricultural adaptation driven by social-psychological decision-making theories
and parameterized using both secondary data sources and primary fieldwork.
Findings indicate that such models may have the potential to produce
well-informed macro-level patterns based on theoretically-informed micro-level
inputs. This has important implications for the broader agent-base modeling
community, and the work concludes with a call for further collaboration between
agent-based modelers and social science theorists. </p>
<p>Collectively, this work seeks to
inform theory on agricultural adaptation and vulnerability, as well as explore
the potential role of theoretically-informed agent-based modeling in
investigating such dynamics. In doing so, it lays the groundwork for future
exploration of these ideas in the Eastern Snake Plain and throughout the arid
American West. </p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:purdue.edu/oai:figshare.com:article/9108323 |
| Date | 13 August 2019 |
| Creators | Jason Kelly Hawes (7043078) |
| Source Sets | Purdue University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis |
| Rights | CC BY 4.0 |
| Relation | https://figshare.com/articles/A_Mixed-Methods_Analysis_of_Agricultural_Adaptation_to_Water_Stress/9108323 |
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