Study On The Impact Of Climate Variation And Climate Change On Livelihood Vulnerability Of Fruit Farmers In The Loess Plateau

As a major natural environmental factor,climate plays a decisive role in agricultural production and has an important impact on farmers who are the main producers of agricultural products.In recent years,climate variability and climate change have occurred continuously.There are climate changes that have gradually changed over time,and there are sudden climate variations that occur in a short period of time.As the largest apple producing area in China and even in the world,the Loess Plateau is intertwined with climate variability and climate change,posing serious threats to agricultural production and farmer livelihoods in the main producing areas.On the one hand,climate not only affects the output and quality of apples,but also affects the market for apples,causing fluctuation in production prices,which causes the vulnerability of farmers' livelihoods.On the other hand,Apple's product and management,farmers' livelihoods are also affected by the lag of climate variability and climate change in the previous year,which further expands the consequences of vulnerability.Because of the long production cycle of apples,that's planting structure cannot be changed in the short term and sensitive to the climate.However,climate variability is sudden and intermittent,which can cause large losses to apple production management and farmers' livelihoods in a short period of time;climate change has long-term effects,and the impact on apple production management and farmers' livelihoods is potential and continuous.Most of the existing research confuses climate variability with climate change,and pays more attention to the direct impact of climate on farmers' livelihood,ignoring the indirect and lag effects of climate,resulting in low vulnerability assessment results.Moreover,the status and mechanism of the market price of apples in the process of climate impact on the vulnerability of livelihoods is still unclear.This study takes the main apple producing areas of Shaanxi Province in the Loess Plateau as the research object.Based on the survey data of 354 representative households in 16 major apple producing counties in Shaanxi Province,Looking at climate sources from both climate variability and climate change perspectives,constructing theory framework from the direct impact of climate on farmers' livelihoods,and the indirect impact by the mediating effect of price fluctuations,Using actual measurement methods to measure climate variability,farmers' subjective perception methods to measure climate change,select SPSS macro(Process program)based on Bootstrap's mediating effect test method,The theoretical hypothesis that “Climate variability and climate change affect farmers' livelihood through direct and indirect paths,price fluctuations plays a mediating role” and “climate variability and climate change has a lag effect on livelihood vulnerability” are verified.Thus,this determines the influence Mechanism of climate variability and climate change on livelihood.This avoids the blindness of adaptation policies for direct paths only,and the incompleteness of the vulnerability assessment results only by considering the effects of climate in a single year.The study showed that:(1)Climate variability and climate change have a positive and significant impact on apple production price fluctuations.(2)Both climate variability and climate change have a positive and significant impact on farmers' livelihood vulnerability.Price fluctuations played a significant mediating effect in the process of climate variability and climate change affecting livelihood vulnerability.(3)The climate variability of the previous year did not have a significant lag effect on price fluctuations and livelihood vulnerability.The previous year's climate change had a significant positive impact on price fluctuations and livelihood vulnerability.(4)Price fluctuations play a mediating effect in the lag effect process of climate change in the previous year.In this process,the mediating effect of price fluctuations is less than the mediating effect of the climate change process in the current year.Therefore,this paper proposes policy recommendations for climate variability and climate change,price fluctuations and farmer's livelihood: as a source of vulnerability,farmers should actively respond and defend against climate variability and climate change in the context of protecting the ecological environment,reducing climate variability and climate change.Price fluctuations as a mediating variable,the government departments should establish an effective market mechanism to strictly control the stability of Apple's production prices;farmers as the main body of interest,the relevant government departments should work together with the farmers themselves to improve the feedback capacity of farmers in many ways.