ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Clim.
Sec. Climate Adaptation
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fclim.2025.1604488
Beekeepers’ intentions to adopt resilience strategies for climate change: a comparative and integrated approach using Theory of Planned Behavior and Protection Motivation Theory
Provisionally accepted
Emna Ouertani1*
Yamna Erraach1
Lamia Arfa1Zein Kallas2
Tisiana De Magistris3
Selene Ivette Ornelas Herrera2- 1Carthage University, Tunis, Tunisia
- 2Polytechnic University of Catalonia (CREDA-UPC), Castelldefels, Spain
- 3Agri-Food Technical Research Centre (CITA), Zaragoza, Spain
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Beekeeping plays a vital role in global food security, contributing to the pollination of up to 30% of global food production, ensuring subsequently the sustainability of food supplies worldwide.However, climate change has had a significant impact on beekeeping in recent years, affecting honeybees, pollination, and honey harvesting. Due to the impacts of climate variability, which impose environmental strain on bees and beekeepers, modifications in management strategies and agricultural practices are vital to enhance biodiversity, guarantee agricultural sustainability, and ensure food security. This paper aims to investigate the factors influencing beekeepers' intentions to adopt resilience strategies in response to climate change using the Protection Motivation Theory (PMT), the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), and an extended PMT model. The study uses data obtained from a survey of 120 Tunisian beekeepers. The findings of the Partial Least Squares highlight the value and complementarity of the three models (TPB, PMT, and extended PMT), with the extended model offering a better explanatory power as well as superior predictive. The TPB model reveals the significant influence of perceived behavioral control and attitudes toward climate change resilience strategies on the intention to adopt them. The PMT model emphasizes the roles of self-efficacy, coping appraisal, and the perception of climate change occurrence in shaping adoption intentions, with self-efficacy being the most impactful factor. The extended PMT model further demonstrates that self-efficacy strongly influences perceived behavioral control. Overall, all three models show a positive and significant impact of intention on the selection of specific resilience strategies.
Keywords: Beekeeping, Climate Change, Resilience strategies, Structural Equation Models, Theory of planned behaviour (TPB), Protection motivation theory (PMT)
Received: 01 Apr 2025; Accepted: 15 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Ouertani, Erraach, Arfa, Kallas, De Magistris and Ornelas Herrera. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Emna Ouertani, Carthage University, Tunis, Tunisia
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