Farmers' perceptions of permanent grasslands and their intentions to adapt to climate change influence their resilience strategy

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Abstract Climate change will increase average temperatures and the frequency and intensity of summertime droughts; those shifts will in turn affect forage production in grassland-based livestock farms. Farmers will accordingly likely have to implement adaptation strategies to cope with the effects of climate change. We hypothesized that farmers' resilience strategies would depend on (i) their intention to adapt to climate change, which partly results from previous climate risk exposure, (ii) how they perceive the values and disvalues of multi-species permanent grasslands (PGs), and (iii) that both of the aforementioned factors would vary according to the geographical context of each farm. We carried out 15 semi-structured interviews with dairy cattle farmers in the French Massif Central; the farms were distributed along a range of climatic and topographic conditions. We used (i) the Model of Proactive Private Adaptation to Climate Change to analyze farmers' individual process of adaptation, (ii) the Integrated Nature Futures Framework to analyze farmers' perception of multi-species PGs, and (iii) text analysis to identify the farmers' adaptation strategies. Nine of the farmers felt that they were already adapted to climate change or that they had a plan in place to implement new adaptations in the future. We observed straightforward relationships between these farmers' perception of PGs and their choice of adaptation strategy; those relationships varied, however, with the geographical context of each farm. Farmers in the northern Massif Central and southern uplands highlighted the values of PGs and considered PGs to be central to their adaption strategies. Conversely, farmers in the southern lowlands mostly referred to the disvalues of PGs; they based their adaptation strategies on temporary grasslands and forage crops. Three of the farmers believed that climate change posed a significant risk, but they foresaw little room to maneuver. Despite acknowledging the values of PGs, those individuals did not intend to use PGs to adapt to climate change. The final three farmers did not intend to adapt to climate change; their reasoning stemmed from either a mindset of fatalism or their acknowledged desire to retire soon. Extreme events such as the summertime drought of 2003 and human factors such as intergenerational transmission of farm can accordingly facilitate or inhibit climate change-related adaptation. It is accordingly important to take into account both socio-psychological and environmental factors when analyzing how grassland-based farmers transition to more climate change-resilient systems.