Paper short abstract:

Local discourses on wild flora management in a French rural area give insight on how is (or not) perceived climate change by local communities, on adaptation strategies as well as social tensions emerging from the facing of environmental and social transformations.

Paper long abstract:

Rural areas of the european temperate countries are affected by climate changes that are not always perceived by local communities. In this communication we want to focus on how local discourses on biodiversity, and in our case study on wild flora, can give us insight of what people see as changing in their environment. This research is part of a larger interdisciplinary and comparative program on local perception of environmental changes funded by the French ANR. We conducted ethnographic investigations and participant observations on perceptions of biodiversity changes in the Bas-Comminges, French rural area which agriculture is based on extensive mixed farming.

Wild flora managements there are shaped and impacted by traditional agricultural practices, rural and agricultural policies or warmer temperatures and climate change. We will show that (1) wild flora is seen as growing and expending positively and negatively due to changes in agriculture and to warmer temperatures, (2) discourses on those impacts reveal different types of knowledge and uses of local flora and (3) social conflicts emerge around its management and reveal tensions as well as different objectives for the land within a changing community. We will demonstrate that warmer temperatures are not linked to climate changes and that environmental and social changes can not be apprehended separately. More broadly, we want to understand how rural populations are facing and adaptating to strong environmental transformations ; local, ad hoc, and iterative efforts based on local, non-scientific knowledge derived from observation and lived experience will be critically important in adaptation to change.