Farmers' adaptation and mitigation practices in the Upper Rhine Valley: Drivers, synergies and trade‐offs

Abstract

Through semi‐structured interviews, this work analyses the motives and drivers leading wine growers and crop farmers in the Upper Rhine Valley (France, Germany, Switzerland) to adopt climate change adaptation and mitigation practices. We show that the main motive is to adapt, seen from an individual and reactive point of view. However, these practices sometimes also bring negative side effects in the long term or on other actors, and considering other problematics. On the contrary, other farmers’ thinking is more anticipatory and they pay more attention to the common good. Nevertheless, they are not necessarily the most successful in adaptation in the short term as they often are more affected. This shows the limits of the concept of adaptation, as centred on individuals and eluding issues that are not related to climate change. That is why we prefer considering system transitions, taking into account the interactions between the diverse problematics and actors.