Workshop 1

Framework and Objective

While the impact of climate change on our lives is already visible, there is no longer any doubt that the frequency and intensity of exceptional climatic events will increase in the future. The territorialized food systems – supported by their actors – will have to find, like all the components of our societies, strategies, and answers to the challenges that climate change already poses to production, the characteristics and quality of products and yields, with possible consequences on the incomes of farmers and associated actors, but also on ecosystems, the expectations and needs of consumers and of society.

Faced with the need to adapt to environmental, climatic, economic, and social crises, farmers are progressively seeking to distinguish themselves by adapting their practices and the quality of their products to societal and consumer expectations, as well as to enhance their remarkable know-how, which often has a beneficial role in the conservation of natural and cultural resources. These strategies are carried out both at the individual level (farms) and collectively through producers’ organizations or sectors.

From this point of view, differentiation approaches are attracting growing interest. Indeed, these tools enable them to gain visibility and activate, through agricultural and food products, the propensity of consumers to better remunerate the services rendered by agriculture, to revitalize the biological and cultural heritage in the territories. Geographical indications (GIs), Slow Food Presidia: there are many ways of enhancing the value of agricultural and food products available to communities today. Among them, intellectual property protection tools such as GIs, which aim to enhance the value of products through a quality approach based on the link to their origin and supported by an official guarantee and protection system for consumers and producers, are being developed throughout the world. Other approaches such as World Heritage of Humanity, Biosphere Reserves, Globally important agricultural heritage systems, Mountain Partnership, aim to recognize the remarkable biological and cultural characteristics of an agricultural system in an approach oriented towards the conservation, promotion, adaptation, and transmission of the heritage associated with socio-ecosystems.

This rise in differentiation systems observed throughout the world is being questioned by the emergence of global issues such as the sustainable construction of systems and the consequences of climate change. In this context, to what extent are the systems for enhancing the value of traditional agricultural systems and their food products based on typicality, the link to the terroir, ancestral know-how and practices and remarkable socio-ecosystems capable of responding to the challenges of sustainable development or of better resisting climate disruption and/or contributing to the mitigation of these changes (by preserving or increasing biodiversity and associated resilience, by storing carbon, etc.).

To guide our workshop discussions, we will use the Brundtland Report’s definition of sustainable development: “Sustainable development is a development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Two concepts are inherent in this notion: the concept of “needs”, and more particularly the essential needs of the poorest, to whom the highest priority should be given, and the idea of the limitations that the state of our technology and social organization imposes on the capacity of the environment to meet present and future needs. As this definition is based on the impact of our generation on future generations, it directly implies our ability to respond to the challenges posed by climate change.

Workshop 1 of the 2022 edition of the forum will therefore be the place to share and reflect on the tools for assessing the sustainability of differentiation approaches in the context of climate change.