Impact of Risk Preference on Grape Growers’ Climate Adaptation Behaviors: Mediating Roles of Credit Access and Moderating Roles of Social Trust

Improving the climate adaptability of farmers is crucial to ensuring agricultural production and achieving the goal of sustainable development in agriculture. Against the background of climate change aggravating agricultural risks, how do farmers’ own risk attitudes affect their adaptive behavior? Based on the micro-survey data of 480 grape growers in the Turpan-Hami Basin in 2025, we used the least squares method (OLS) to explore the impact of risk appetite on the climate adaptation behavior of farmers and its mechanism. The study found that risk appetite significantly promoted the adoption of adaptive behaviors by farmers. For every 1 unit increase in the risk preference score, the number of climate-adaptive behaviors adopted by farmers increased by an average of 0.322. Mechanism testing shows that both formal credit and informal credit play a partial intermediary role. The intermediary effect accounts for 18.3% and 36.3% respectively, and the transmission effect of informal credit is stronger; Institutional trust and interpersonal trust both positively regulate the relationship between risk preference and adaptive behavior at the level of 1%. Research shows that we should take into account risk education and production environment optimization, pay attention to the supplementary role of private lending, and build a multi-level trust promotion system to jointly improve the climate adaptability of farmers.