The Role of Cultural Factors in Supporting Policies to Adapt to Climate Change by Farmers Case Study: Babolsar city

Climate change is a phenomenon that rapidly occurring and the necessity to adapt it are crucial. Knowledge of climate change and the certainty of its occurrence are critical to the empowerment of vulnerable groups towards its outcome. Taking a scientific and proper approach to deal with the issue of global climate change (GCG) requires awareness towards this phenomenon which helps to make a proper and applicable policy. In other words، to address CC issues like environmental risks we need to understand the causes، consequences and potential solutions to CC. Because، environmental issues of the early twenty first century are characterized by a high level of scientific and technical complexity، good citizens needs to be well informed and more accurate on decisions about scientific issues. The present study utilized survey method and the main tool for data collection was questionnaire. Given that the main focus of study is assessing farmers’ knowledge، the unit of analysis in this study is farmers and level of analysis is micro. To this end، total population was 7861 of farmers’ Babolsar that using multi-stage cluster sampling، 140 were selected as samples. A total of 140 farmers were interviewed face to face، using questionnaires. The questionnaire consisted of 64 questions. The questions were either open ended or in multiple choice format. The rate of validity’ questions were higher than 60 percent. 3 hypotheses were examined. Data entry، editating and final processing was performed by applying software SPSS. The initial analysis showed that the dependent variable did have a normal distribution and we utilized parametric test (e. g. Pearson correlation coefficient، Regression model) for hypothesis testing accordingly. The findings show that knowledge of climate change and belief in the occurrence and level of supporting the policies is rather moderate، declined to high. Based on regression analysis، the average agricultural land and a belief in the occurrence of climate change، were the most important factors affecting policies supports. In contrast، the age and knowledge of climate change showed no effect on supporting climate change policies. The results of this study showed that knowledge does not necessarily lead to supporting climate change policies. Belief in climate change played a major role in creating incentives to tackle climate change. In fact، those villagers who believe climate change is happening and that human activity is the main source of climate change، they expressed greater willingness to undertake collective action to support adaptation and mitigation policies. Based on the above results، the following can be presented as research suggestions.