The role of climate change adaptation in food consumption

To incentivize farmers to invest more in resilient crops and farming technologies to face extreme weather events, a more conscious purchase habit that accounts for the farmers’ ecological production choices is needed. This could be achieved through a higher price premium for food that provides an additional environmental benefit. Therefore, we aim to identify possible channels through which policy measures, such as public information, may influence more adaptable food purchases to climate change.
To test the elasticity of green consumers’ demand in substituting a green product that requires higher inputs in terms of natural resources with a ”greener” one, we conduct a field experiment. We provide green consumers with more information about farmers’ decision to use a more resilient crop that is less productive in the short run but ensures prolonged water-saving capacity in drought circumstances. The experiment focuses on durum wheat cultivars employed to produce pasta. At the time of purchasing, consumers are unaware of the environmental impacts or the ecosystem services supply behind seemingly homogeneous food items, such as pasta made with different cultivars. However, the ancient cultivar Cappelli is able to tolerate high-temperature stress compared to more common and modern durum wheat.
We randomized our sample of around 3,000 individuals who made previous online purchases in the last three years on the Alce Nero website. Alce Nero is a leading player in terms of sales volume in the Italian organic sector, controlling also a structured network of more than 1,000 producers and processors at the national and international levels.
We developed two types of informative treatments: one more colloquial and one that uses scientific and graphic evidence of the water resource efficiency of the ancient wheat cultivar compared to the modern one. Both treated and controlled groups received by email a discount valid for any purchase only if they accept to answer a small survey on socio-demographic information and their motivation for buying organic food. One of the aims of the survey is to isolate the environmental concern to other possible “non-environmental” confounds, such as taste and health, that may either lead a consumer to buy Cappelli pasta; only the treated groups received the treatment on the front page of the survey. We employ three types of discounts 5%, 10%, and 20% to incentivize survey participation and observe the non-linear effect of price on demand.
The preliminary evidence of our study suggests that consumers exposed to the treatments switch from purchasing pasta made from the modern wheat cultivar to the more adaptive and resilient Cappelli wheat cultivar.
Overall, this study is a step forward in the literature regarding the environmental costs of food. We propose that the price premium for green products should not only reflect the trade-off between productivity and sustainability but also differentiate among those products that safeguard environmental services more effectively than others under conditions of high climate stress while maintaining a productive and resilient performance.