Increasing climate change resilience in agriculture: who is responsible?

Achieving climate change (CC) resilience in a timely and efficient fashion is becoming a major priority across multiple sectors. Agricultural CC adaptation has become an integrated part of agricultural development policy throughout the EU and further. Without the timely implementation of appropriate measures, the vulnerability of highly exposed and sensitive agricultural landscapes with low adaptive capacity will increase. This paper focuses on the Vipava Valley, a sub-Mediterranean agricultural area highly vulnerable to CC, describing the stakeholder landscape approach undertaken to define stakeholder responsibility level in terms of implementing adaptation measures; and it identifies the key challenges facing stakeholder networks at individual measure levels. The strategy for agricultural CC adaptation follows the structure proposed by the European Commission and clearly defines the necessary stakeholder landscape for implementing agricultural CC adaptation measures and indicators for adaptation strategy monitoring and evaluation. The challenges identified in relation to stakeholder interaction cannot be solved by strategy alone; a facilitated approach to policy implementation is necessary, its success being dependent on the ability of the social landscape to develop a firm implementation of a monitoring programme for adaptation to CC at the local municipality level.