From straw burning to incorporation: climate risk and farm machineries availability catalyse sustainable behavioural change among rice farmers

Abstract Open burning of rice straw remains widespread across many rice-producing regions, generating avoidable greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, and soil degradation. Yet the transition to sustainable straw management remains limited, especially in climate-stressed smallholder systems. This study explores farmers’ behavioral readiness and economic preferences to adopt rice-straw incorporation, willingness to pay (WTP) for its adoption, and identifies how socioeconomic, farm and climatic factors shaping these decisions. Using a combination of contingent valuation method, ordered logit, Heckman selection, and double-hurdle models, we analyze survey data of 435 rice-farmers collected through stratified-random sampling from three climate-hazardous (i.e., drought, salinity, and flood) districts and one less climate-risk district of Bangladesh. Adoption of straw-incorporation is very low (14%), however, a larger share of farmers (31%) show interest in adopting and 28% are willing to pay an average of USD37/ha/season—revealing substantial latent demand for straw-incorporation. Farmers in climate-vulnerable areas show a significantly higher probability of paying for straw-incorporation than those in less vulnerable areas, with WTP highest in salinity-affected regions. The finding implies that climate risk acts as a catalyst for behavioral change toward adoption of sustainable straw-management. Education, household income and accessibility to farm-machineries are the key drivers of shifting towards straw-incorporation and its WTP. Given Bangladesh’s dependence on rental farm machinery, subsidized and accessible straw-management machinery rental services could enable adoption at costs below farmers stated WTP. These findings provide globally relevant evidence that climate risk can increase receptiveness to low-emission residue management in smallholder rice systems. For climate-vulnerable and resource-constrained agricultural economies, the results suggest targeted machinery access, increasing farmer’s awareness, and market-based incentives such as carbon finance to accelerate the shift from open burning to sustainable straw management.