Bridging the Adoption Gap: Integrating Behavioral Insights to Accelerate Climate-Smart Agriculture in Lebanon

Swiss partners

• Berner Fachhochschule: Zenebe Uraguchi, Célia Bühler

 MENA partners

• American University of Beirut: Shadi Kamal Hamadeh

•  Saint Joseph University of Beirut: Samar Morkos

Presentation of the project

Lebanon’s agricultural sector is trapped in a perfect storm: climate volatility, economic collapse, and institutional fragility. Smallholder farmers, vital to national food security, face rising temperatures, declining rainfall, and soaring input costs. Although climate-smart agriculture (CSA) practices such as drip irrigation and drought-tolerant crops are proven, adoption remains critically low. This project addresses a vital gap: how farmers in fragile settings make decisions under stress. While CSA in Lebanon has been widely studied through technical and economic lenses, behavioral factors have been largely overlooked. This initiative is the first in Lebanon to systematically examine how six behavioral constructs (present bias, loss aversion, optimism bias, social norms, bounded rationality, and mental accounting) interact with structural barriers to shape farmer decisions on CSA practices.