No farmer no food, assessing farmers climate change mitigation, and adaptation behaviors in farm production

The climatic events and increasing population are impacting the food system's resilience. The significance of a looming food crisis may be more pronounced in a country like Pakistan. Therefore, to manage farm production sustainably, this research infers the Value-Belief-Norm (VBN) theory to analyze small growers' pro-environmental adaptation and mitigation behaviors on the farm. The data of 250 samples were collected from the Sindh province of Pakistan. We applied the partial least squire modeling (PLS-SEM) to examine the farmers' pro-environmental behaviors towards climate change mitigation and adaptation practices in farm productions. The results provide evidence that farmers' pro-environmental personal norms R2(80.2%), explain mitigation attitudes (41.2%), and (29.0%) adaptation behaviors of growers. All antecedents of VBN theory reveal robustness and significantly positive relationships except for egoistic values. Thus, pro-environmental personal norms predicted the farmers-orientation behaviors significantly toward the climate variability adaptation practices and mitigation attitudes. Moreover, findings indicate that the VBN theory enacts well when expounding altruistic values and biospheric values of farmers' mitigation attitudes and adaptation behaviors. Despite guaranteeing food security, this research suggests designing policy tools to encourage small growers' pro-environmental behaviors in response to climatic changes to increase sustainable agricultural production in the region.