Peri-urban Farmers’ Perception of Climate Change: Values and Perspectives – A French Case Study
Résumé
Peri-urban agriculture often relates to sustainable agriculture and is recognized as a source of fresh and local food intended to maintain healthy populations in and around cities. It is significant in dealing with pressing societal challenges such as sustainable land management, community building, economic development growth, and climate change mitigation and adaptation. Understanding how peri-urban farmers perceive climate change has important implications for adaptation measures implementation.
This chapter aims to understand the underlying mechanisms shaping how peri-urban farmers process information about climate change and perceive this phenomenon. We argue that these mechanisms are complex and multidimensional, linking many attitudes (e.g., risk perceptions, trust in local policies and institutions versus skepticism and denial, etc.) and values (e.g., ecological awareness, efficient use of on-farm resources, etc.), thereby affecting farmers’ willingness to implement adaptation measures. We applied a survey-based approach to collect data from 102 farmers in Rouen Normandy Metropole in France. The questionnaire sought to understand the mechanisms underlying peri-urban farmers’ perception of climate change. The findings revealed five types of farmers: the resilient, the negativist, the peri-urban steward, the independent, and the regulation skeptic. The discussion put forward that identifying farmer types through regional studies helps explore possible adaptation measures to be implemented depending on the farming systems and the specific characteristics of each geographic area. Such granularity enables tackling climate change as a set of localized environmental challenges with localized contexts worthy of specific solutions and interventions that could help spread localized urban food systems.