Challenge description

Climate change political support for agricultural climate change adaptation is especially important in the water-scarce Mediterranean, sub-Mediterranean and arid agricultural regions highly vulnerable to climate change, for instance, the latest climate change projections for the 21st century for the sub-Mediterranean Vipava Valley, Slovenia, indicate high exposure to climate change and further degradation of existing agricultural conditions. EURO-CORDEX climate simulations (Jacob et al. 2014), for the moderately optimistic scenario RCP4.5, assuming significant mitigating action regarding the future releases of greenhouse gases, have shown an increase in average annual temperature (+1.8 °C), a decrease in summer precipitation (−4%), and an increase of summer evapotranspiration (+6%) (Honzak et al. 2017). Drought, flooding and strong winds caused over €15 m damage on over 12,000 ha of agricultural land in 2012–2014 alone. Local agriculture is therefore highly sensitive to climate change (Cvejić & Pintar 2017). Agricultural climate change adaptation and mitigation is increasingly and widely addressed in various national strategic documents. In reviewing the existing climate change documents, 93 measures refer to agricultural climate change adaptation, accounting for nearly 60% of all climate change adaptation measures. The number of measures intended for direct and/or indirect agricultural climate change adaptation in 2014–2020 are increasing when compared with the previous periods of 1991–2006 and 2007–2013 (Kompare & Klančnik 2017).

Studies focusing on policy implementation success indicate that a shortfall in terms of coordination amongst different stakeholders (such as the farmer extension service, local government, ministries, and experts) and their low capacity for self-organising are the main obstacles facing agricultural climate change adaptation. How to solve the long lasting problem and change social landscape in Vipava Valley.

Citation

1412. Cvejić, M. Černič Istenič, M. Glavan, L. Honzak, K. Klančnik, K. Kompare, M. Pintar; Increasing climate change resilience in agriculture: who is responsible?. Water Supply 1 August 2019; 19 (5): 1405–1412. doi: https://doi.org/10.2166/ws.2019.009

Challenge vision

In order to tackle climate change in Vipava Valley there is a big need to connect all stakeholders and make them act on multiple solutions that have been made in the past. Vipava Valley can become an example of regenerative landscape design.