Climate Change Perception, Food-security Awareness and Adaptation among Rural Households: A Critical Narrative Review of Selected Global Evidence

Abstract

Rural households whose livelihoods depend on rain-fed agriculture, pastoralism, fisheries and related activities are exposed to climatic variability through production, income, food access and livelihood stability. This critical narrative review examines how rural households perceive climate change, how food-security awareness and measured food-security status have been conceptualised, and how perception is translated, or fails to be translated, into adaptation and food-security outcomes. The review synthesises accessible peer-reviewed and authoritative institutional literature published principally from 2000 to 6 April 2026, with foundational earlier work used where needed to define concepts and measurement approaches. The evidence indicates that rural households in many studied settings report rising temperature, altered rainfall timing, greater rainfall variability and more frequent climate-related shocks, although perception is more reliable for temperature direction than for complex precipitation variability. Perception is shaped by farming experience, education, gendered labour roles, land and livestock assets, access to extension, climate information, credit and local ecological knowledge. The adaptation pathway is not linear. Perception may increase the likelihood of adopting practices such as crop diversification, altered planting dates, irrigation investment, livelihood diversification and improved seed use, yet these responses do not necessarily improve food security when households face insecure tenure, weak markets, limited finance, inadequate extension, or low perceived efficacy. Food-security status is commonly assessed with experience-based or dietary instruments, while food-security awareness as a distinct cognitive construct is seldom measured directly. The literature remains dominated by cross-sectional household surveys and uneven regional coverage, with stronger representation from sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia than from Latin America, small-island states and Central Asia. Future work should prioritise longitudinal and multi-respondent household designs, direct measurement of food-security awareness, stronger linkage between meteorological records and reported perceptions, and explicit assessment of maladaptation.