Scotti, I.; Ievoli, C.; Bindi, L.; Bispini, S.; Belliggiano, A. Facing Climate Vulnerability in Mountain Areas: The Role of Rural Actors’ Agency and Situated Knowledge Production. Sustainability2023, 15, 15877.
Scotti, I.; Ievoli, C.; Bindi, L.; Bispini, S.; Belliggiano, A. Facing Climate Vulnerability in Mountain Areas: The Role of Rural Actors’ Agency and Situated Knowledge Production. Sustainability 2023, 15, 15877.
Scotti, I.; Ievoli, C.; Bindi, L.; Bispini, S.; Belliggiano, A. Facing Climate Vulnerability in Mountain Areas: The Role of Rural Actors’ Agency and Situated Knowledge Production. Sustainability2023, 15, 15877.
Scotti, I.; Ievoli, C.; Bindi, L.; Bispini, S.; Belliggiano, A. Facing Climate Vulnerability in Mountain Areas: The Role of Rural Actors’ Agency and Situated Knowledge Production. Sustainability 2023, 15, 15877.
Abstract
Mountains can be described as socio-ecological systems (SESs), a complex set of relations that involve natural aspects and human communities. Mountains provide indispensable ecosystem services, but they are affected by climate change. For this, stakeholders’ initiatives to face global warming, particularly farmers, are essential and participatory strategy are largely considered as a best solution to involve them in adopting resilience actions. Despite that, farmers are considered passive actors and their epistemology weak. Investigating mountain actors' vulnerability to climate change in the North of Molise (an Italian region), called «Alto Molise», we suggest considering farmers agency as a result of interconnections among heterogeneous elements present in the SES and their “lay” knowledge and epistemology equally relevant that experts one. Farmers’ perception of climate change impact is appropriate, although they lack a clear understanding of it. Their resilience actions or suggestions are coherent with their resources endowment (financial and knowledge) and their position in the economic system but not necessarily effective. The work contributes to the debate on climate resilience in mountain areas stressing the significance of local actors' agency, the presence of different epistemologies (lay and expert one) and the need to actively involve them in designed effective and suitable initiatives to face climate change.
Keywords
climate change perception; farmers' agency; mountain area; resilience; rural development
Subject
Social Sciences, Sociology
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
