Facing drought: exposure, vulnerability and adaptation options of extensive livestock systems in the French Pre-Alps

Extensive livestock farming is a key activity in the Alpine region, contributing to the economy and maintaining typical landscapes, high biological and cultural diversity. With climate change, recent and unprecedented multi-year droughts are threatening these extensive production systems and the positive externalities they deliver. This study aims to better understand the local exposure and vulnerability components that shape the drought risk in these systems, as a first step towards adaptation. We performed an original farm-level assessment, which to our knowledge has never been done in mountain livestock farming, combining climatic data with biophysical and socio-technical data derived from semi-structured interviews with farmers. We focused on three main types of mountain livestock farms in a drought-prone and traditional breeding area of the French Pre-Alps named the Vercors: (1) mountain grassland-specialised dairy systems, (2) mountain rangeland-based suckler systems and (3) middle-mountain rangeland-based suckler systems. Our results show the extent to which the components of exposure (i.e. characteristics of drought hazards faced by farms locally) and vulnerability (i.e. sensitivity and strategies to cope with or adapt to drought) vary between farms and how different combinations of these components contribute to different patterns of the drought risk in relation to the different geographical, biophysical or socio-technical characteristics of livestock farms in the study area. Further, we identify the main environmental, socio-economic and institutional constraints that currently reduce the coping and adaptive capacity of farms. Finally, we discuss the combinations and drivers of concrete adaptation options in the specific context of extensive mountain livestock farming. In addition to place-specific results offering an operational dimension for stakeholders in the case-study area, our study contributes to scientific advances by developing a methodological sequence broadly applicable on how to inform the risk of drought impacts in agro-pastoral livestock systems.