Preserving the water ressource in the French Jura massif : using a holistic method to better share and adapt to climate change
Adaptation of pastoralism to climate change doesn’t only rely on the shoulders of shepherds and livestock farmers. To deal with climate change, it is important to have a global view, understand how stakes intertwine and think about the adaptation of an ecoregion as a whole - otherwise it cannot be sustainable. That’s what Olivier Erard demonstrates within a project led by the Community of Agglomeration of the Pays de Gex and the National Natural Reserve of the High Jura’s mountains range, which objective was to work on the preservation of the water ressource while answering the needs of pastoral farmers.
This project stems from the observation of how climate change affects the water ressource (even in a rainly territory as the Jura !). In fact, dry summers, like summer 2022, when 1000 ha of forestburned (1) mobilising hundreds of firefighters, risks to become the norm by 2050, and maybe even before. Other impacts, such as the increase of variability of rain will appear. The necessary protection of the water ressource is already creating tensions within some sectors of activity. For example, local apastoralism and forestry stakeholders take offense about a double standard : “We are asked to be more careful and we are imposed many constraints, but we represent a small % of the water ressource used meanwhile some people are still allowed to fill their swimming pool down in the plain”.
To answer this challenge, the project analysed the region in a holistic way : stakes are interconnected and it’s necessary to understand them as a whole and in their complexity. For this, all the stakeholders need to “work together differently”.
The first step was to organise two forward-looking/propsective workshops with locals stakeholders (farmers, foresters,…). They enabled to identify some “tipping points” which have been already reached (like forest decline), which will be plausibly reached by 2040~2050 (like the forests and meadows CO2 captation decline), and some levers of actions (for instance, taking more into account any impact made on soils as they are the cornerstone of forests and meadows vitality). The second step was then to organise a workshop with some technical advisers, to draw up possible trajectories at short, medium and long term. The main idea of this study what to keep in mind the necessity to work simultaneously and in parallel.
The National Natural Reserve of the High Jura’s mountains range and the Community of Agglomeration of the Pays de Gex, the project commissioners, were really satisfied with this work, which demonstrated that innovative methods like this can really help to deepen relationships beetween stakeholders and facilitate the shared management of precious ressources such as water, in the context of climate change. Adaptation can not be resolved by hyper-focused solutions i but must be addressed in a holistic way. For the adaptation of pastoralism, we need to understand its integration in the territorial ecosystem, in relation with all the other activities and stakeholders.
(1) Cour des Comptes (fr)