Identifying climatic impacts experienced in market gardening systems in southern France: an essential step to initiate systemic adaptation to climate change

Abstract

The Occitanie and Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur French regions produce large amounts of a wide variety of fresh vegetables. This production is threatened by climate change, which is altering production conditions. Vegetable farms and their supply chains will face major climate impacts in the short and medium term in these regions. To increase their capacity to adapt to these disruptions, stakeholders in the agricultural sector need to identify which climate hazards their systems will be exposed to and under what conditions these would have damaging effects, taking into account their specific operational context. It is therefore necessary to clarify the actual relations between climate-related variables and the components of these vegetable systems. While the scientific literature provides trends regarding these relations, the available knowledge on vegetable farming systems is incomplete, theoretical, and disconnected from the operational realities of local production. We developed a methodology to address this lack of operationally oriented knowledge, based on the mobilization of empirical and localized knowledge from local practitioners. The impacts of climate change on southern vegetable farming systems are already visible, varied, and multi-level. They require incremental as well as systemic and transformative adaptations, some of which were identified by the surveyed stakeholders.