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

Summary

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; t