Human factors and their acting pathway influencing livestock and poultry farmers' willingness to environmental management in coastal areas: a model of bayesian network

Abstract Environmental pollution of livestock and poultry breeding (LPB) has always been a global hot topic. This study has introduced a bayesian network model to explore factors influencing the LPB farmers' willingness to environmental management based on 121 questionnaires obtained from coastal China. This study revealed that: (1) Educational level, breeding scale, annual income of breeding, farmers' environmental awareness, the availability of technical guidance, environmental perception, policy publicity and the completeness of relevant social policies all positively affected farmers' willingness to environmental management. However, farmer's age and subsidies for dead animal showed an opposite effect. (2) Among all factors, acting pathway of "technical guidance → enhancing environmental awareness/increasing breeding income → promoting willingness to prevent environmental pollution" may likely play a dominating role in the LPB environmental management, which deserved to be focused closely in the future. (3) For local government, enhancing perceptions on changes of surrounding soils and air, strengthening the LPB training, and accurately adopting subsidy policies can effectively rise farmers' willingness to the LPB environmental management. This study will be helpful to accurately promote the LPB management in coastal areas.