© 2014 PP House Construcng a Knowledge Test to Measure the Knowledge Level of Farmers about Climate Change in Arid Ecosystem of India Sujit Sarkar 1 , R. N. Padaria 2 , K. Vijayaragavan 3 , Himanshu Pathak 4 , Arpan Bhowmik 5 , Pramod Kumar 6 and G. K. Jha 7 1-3 Division of Agricultural Extension 4 CESCRA, IARI, Pusa campus, New Delhi (110 012), India 5 Agricultural Statistics, IASRI, Library Avenue, New Delhi (110 012), India 6-7 Agricultural Economics, IARI, New Delhi (110012), India Abstract Article History Correspondence to Keywords Manuscript No. AR737 Received in 28 th April, 2014 Received in revised form 12 th November, 2014 Accepted in final form 2 nd December, 2014 Climate change has brought widespread misery and economic loss to farming community of India, adversely affecting agriculture, public health, food security, biodiversity and water resources. Climate change is a very complex issue and most of the farmers did not have any clear cut understanding about it. So it is very important to measure the knowledge level of farmers for successful adaptation. The present study is aimed to construct a knowledge test to measure the knowledge level of farmers in India. One pilot study was conducted to develop the test in Lechura village of Uttar Pradesh. The test was developed with reliability score of 0.709 and a sufficient degree of validity. The final study was conducted in Jodhpur and Jaisalmer district of Rajasthan. The study revealed that only 34% farmers knew about climate change and only 31% farmers knew that paddy cultivation also leads to emission of green house gasses. Cumulatively 45% respondents come under low level of knowledge category on climate change. The correlation analysis revealed that different social variables like education (0.800 * ), perception (0.638 * ), social participation (0.471 * ) and psychological variable like attitude (0.815 * ), value (0.820) and awareness (0.743 * ) were correlated positively with knowledge score of the respondents. However age (-0.257 * ), income (-0.003), area (-0.006), pessimism (-0.621 * ) and stress (-0.451) were correlated negatively. So policy maker should take into consideration these social and psychological dimensions of farmers’ behavior for successful implementation of any adaptation strategy to climate change. * E-mail: sujitgovt@gmail.com Climate change, knowledge test, adaptation International Journal of Bio-resource and Stress Management 2014, 5(4):530-535 1. Introduction The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC, 2007) defined climate change as statistically significant variations in climate that persist for an extended period, typically decades or longer. Climate change has already become a major threat for the livelihood of farmer in developing countries and India is no exception. Though, climate change is a global phenomenon but people are affected by its local impacts. Climate change has brought widespread misery and huge economic losses to India, adversely affecting agriculture, food security, public health, water resources and biodiversity. Das and Tripathi (2014) reported that 40% farmers want to quit farming. Climate change is a very complex issue and not only lay people but well educated people also have difficulties in differentiating among different environmental concepts like climate change, global warming, ozone depletion, weather change, climatic variability etc. People tend to confuse stratospheric ozone depletion with the greenhouse effect and weather with climate (Bostrom et al., 1994). Most of the farmers did not have a clear cut understanding on causes of climate change and what can be its consequence in future. Many of them react to climate change issues on the basis of their own everyday experience. It is acknowledged by the policy makers that at present there is little call from farmers to address the issue. In fact, some farmers, just like some of the general public, are skeptical that climate change is even real. Others are doubtful that whether it will affect agriculture. So, understanding the climate change dynamics is highly important from adaptation point of view. Effective adaptation can only be achieved if farmers possess sufficient knowledge on climate change issues. But very few studies have been conducted so far in this direction. The most extensive measurement of knowledge was made by Sundblad et al in 2007 in Sweden but the measurement was extremely 530 Full Research Article DOI:10.5958/0976-4038.2014.00603.4