Exploring climate change adaptation strategies form the perspective of Mediterranean sheep farmers - INRAE - Institut national de recherche pour l’agriculture, l’alimentation et l’environnement
Conference Papers Year : 2023

Exploring climate change adaptation strategies form the perspective of Mediterranean sheep farmers

Abstract

Sheep production systems in the Mediterranean region are particularly vulnerable to the impact of climate change (CC) due to their relatively high use of local food resources. Most studies analysing farm adaptation strategies tend to follow top-down approaches without considering the feasibility of their implementation on farms. In this work, which is part of the PRIMA project Adapt-Herd, we investigated farmer perceived CC impact on-farm and their view about the best adaptation strategies to future CC scenarios in representative farming systems in Egypt, France, Spain, and Tunisia. Scenarios of CC were developed for each region based on IPCC projections. Two hundred-five farmers were surveyed face-to-face and asked to point out the actions they would take to adapt to the CC scenarios. Possible actions covered feed, grazing, reproduction and flock management, breeding, and machinery and facilities. Strategies were identified using K-modes cluster analysis. Discriminant analysis was used to determine their preferred strategies across countries, farming systems, farm features, and farmer profiles and perceptions. Five general strategies were identified: (1) farm machinery and facilities (high preference in Egypt, France. and Spain); (2) feed intensification (Egypt and Spain); (3) flock management and feed extensification (France); (4) feed optimization (Tunisia); and (5) general farm adaptation. Besides differences among countries, farmers with irrigation systems perceive the impact of feed shortage, and heat stress on farms to be lower than other farmers and tend to prefer strategies focus on machinery and facilities and feed intensification. Our results show that both farm profile and CC impact perception factors influence farmer’s views on adaptation strategies.
No file

Dates and versions

hal-04196872 , version 1 (05-09-2023)

Identifiers

Cite

D. Martín-Collado, S. Lobón, M. Joy, I. Casasús, A. Mohamed-Brahmi, et al.. Exploring climate change adaptation strategies form the perspective of Mediterranean sheep farmers. 74th Annual Meeting of the European Federation of Animal Science, EAAP, Aug 2023, Lyon, France. pp.724, ⟨10.3920/978-90-8686-936-7⟩. ⟨hal-04196872⟩
25 View
0 Download

Altmetric

Share

More