2210-7843 © 2010 Published by Elsevier B.V. doi:10.1016/j.aaspro.2010.09.014 Agriculture and Agricultural Science Procedia 1 (2010) 116–125 Available online at www.sciencedirect.com International Conference on Agricultural Risk and Food Security 2010 Farmer’s Adaptation to Climate Risk in the Context of China -A research on Jianghan Plain of Yangtze River Basin CHEN Li a , ZUO Ting a *, Rabina G. Rasaily a a 1. Introduction No.2 Yuanmingyuan West Road, Haidian Districk, Beijing, 100193, P.R.China Abstract Frequently unknown climate change increases the risk of agriculture, more attention have been paid to agricultural system itself in the research field, but few has been attached to the perspective of social dimension. Based on the research on Yangtze River Basin of China, the paper has adopted vulnerability theory including the exposure of agricultural ecosystem, farmers’ sensitivity to exposure and adaptive capacity to climate risk, to explain farmer’s adaptation to climate risk. It concludes that climate change has increased climate risk in agriculture and the uncertainty of agricultural production. Confronting climate risk in agriculture, different farming bodies have shown different farm and off-farm/non-farm adaptations in pre-risk, during risk and post-risk, which has reduced their short-term vulnerability. Household life cycle, pressure, institution, available resources and technologies are the key influential factors. From the adaptation in long term, it still requires external support and more investment including agricultural insurance system, village-level information and technology dissemination mechanism. © 2010 Published by Elsevier B.V. Key words: Climate risk; vulnerability; adaptation; traditional knowledge; exposure-sensitivity 1S With large emissions of greenhouse gases, changes in temperature and humidity, as well as extreme weathers [1], climate change has been an existing and obvious fact in our world and more and more research are taking on in this field. Agriculture is arguably referred as one of the most climate sensitive sectors [2] and it has produced positive and negative implications to climate change. Olesen et al. [3] summarizes that the intensive farming systems would have great impact on emissions of greenhouse gases such as in Western Europe, whereas some of the low input farming systems currently located in marginal areas may be most severely affected by climate change like in sub- Saharan Africa. Therefore, in the context of global climate change, more attention on reducing agriculture’s contribution to the greenhouse gas should be paid to intensive farming systems while the subsistence farming systems should work more on decreasing agricultural vulnerability to climate change. The latter situation will be discussed in this paper. Agricultural production has always been a risky endeavor [4] and the agriculture vulnerability to climate change is widely recognized in scientific and policy circles, as identified in international policy agreements [5]. The research on climate change in international rural development began in the 18th to 20 th century, and it mainly concentrated in the climate impact on crop growing environment and crops itself adaptation. When came to 21st century, with the frequent occurrence of extreme events in the world, farmers’ adaptation perspectives become the dominant theme. Actually, many studies in different countries have explored farmers’ vulnerability and adaptation