Context

Pastoralism is a form of animal husbandry which makes use of spontaneously vegetated lands to feed livestock through grazing. In mountain settings, high altitude pastures play a fundamental role for farm systems by providing non-cultivated fodder resources directly grazed by flocks, and by enabling specific management at the farm level (breeding calendar, pest control, work load…).

Climate change challenges agropastoral practises by modifying the range and variability of meteorological conditions to which they are adapted. For instance, the alpine pastures are submitted to more frequent drought events and some of them experience an increased water scarcity, with possible impacts on biodiversity and pastoral resources. In this context, herders and shepherds are faced with adaptation challenges to sustain their activity in balance with their environment.

The initiative

The Sentinel Mountain Pastures program (programme “Alpages Sentinelles”) develops as a transdisciplinary network with the objective of supporting pastoral farm systems in their adaptation to climate change while ensuring the high environmental quality of mountain pastures. To this end, a deepened understanding of the impacts of climate change on high altitude grasslands as well as of the vulnerability and adaptive capacity of the socio-ecosystem to face these changes is targeted. The objective is also to share experiences and adaptation initiatives among shepherds and breeders in order to progress on adaptation pathway towards sustainability.

Launched in 2007 in the Ecrins National Park, the program gathers in 2021 a large panel of stakeholders over the French Alps. It seeks to act as a space for dialogue and knowledge co-production among scientists, agricultural and pastoral technicians, protected area managers, breeders and shepherds.

Monitoring activities are conducted in 30 alpine pastures over the French Alps to gather evidences of the evolution of climatic conditions and to track the possible changes on vegetation and pastoral practices. They are complemented by thematic working groups aiming at co-producing tools and methodologies to support adaptive management of mountain pastures in a context of climate change and increasing associated uncertainty.

Results, limits and enable factors

To date, the program has developed:

• A vegetation database to monitor the evolution of species composition and of biomass production
• An agropastoral database to identify evolutions in practises at the level of the mountain pasture and in relation to the farm system, which is an input for spatio-temporal analyses
• Co-constructed scientific, technical and operational methods and tools to understand impacts and to support adaptation to climate change (pastoral vegetation guidebook, agro-climatic profile of mountain pastures, method for diagnosing summer mountain pastures’ vulnerability to climate change…)

For instance, based on a multiple evidence-based approach, the Sentinel Mountain Pastures program developed a vulnerability analysis framework addressing the different physical, ecological, agro-pastoral and socio-economic dimensions of their agropastoral uses. This framework: i) characterizes pastures’ exposure to climatic hazards in relation to physical features (location, slope, orientation…), ii) identifies the sensitivity of pastures’ vegetation to climatic hazards, and iii) assesses adaptive management capacities on the mountain pastures and in the interaction with the farm systems. This framework, published in English in 2019 (Deléglise et al., 2019 [1]), is also freely available as a technical brochure in French on the program website.

Adaptation practices have been identified and encompass short-term adjustments of annual practices (such as changes in the grazing routes based on the diversity and complementarity of vegetation types) or long-term adaptation of the pastoral activity structure (such as the use of new pasture units or water sources). Changes can take place directly on the summer mountain pasture or at the interface with the farm level (e.g., forage buying to compensate for a lack of resources a given year, structural changes related to the production system and the work organisation…).