Empirical Study on Drought Adaptation of Regional Rainfed Agriculture in China

Abstract. As global surface temperature continues to rise, increasing evidences have shown that social and natural systems are deeply influenced by climate change. The government and farmers' awareness, as well as measures to adapt to these climate-driven changes, are critical for local sustainable development. In this study, we established a conceptual model of the relationship among human adaptation, development demand and environment changes to analyze the mechanism of agricultural drought adaptation based on an empirical research at the famer and government level. These results show that under the impact of climate change, the study area of drought risk has continued to expand. With this condition, the government and farmers have constantly taken measures to control the development demand and adjust to environmental changes in order to adapt to agricultural drought. Interactions among environmental changes, development demand and adaptation measures have kept the regional nature-society-economy compound ecosystem in dynamic balance. In addition, the effect of these adaptation measures always has an inertia that may induce a longer and deeper impact on the region, which is considered when making adaptation strategies. Rainfed areas are considered to be the most sensitive and unstable to environment change. This study reveals the mechanism of adaptation from a macroscopic perspective and may provide some references on measures and strategies for drought adaptation in other rainfed areas.