Getting the conversation going: engaging farmers in exploring agricultural drought risk in the River Fowey catchment, Cornwall, UK

Understanding drought vulnerability and risk, and engaging with the range of statutory and non-statutory actors, is essential in climate adaptation and resilience planning. Our experience suggests that it can be challenging to... [ view full abstract ]

Understanding drought vulnerability and risk, and engaging with the range of statutory and non-statutory actors, is essential in climate adaptation and resilience planning. Our experience suggests that it can be challenging to start conversations with stakeholders about risks such as drought, which seem less imminent, and have less obvious instant impacts, than for example, flood risk. In the Drought Risk and You (DRY) programme and its focus on science-narrative interaction, we have adopted an approach that is based on creating stimulating ‘conversation pieces’, aimed at provoking discussion among actors at a scale that is relevant to them, and which encourage engagement in longer-term dialogues around risk and vulnerability.
This paper presents a case study based on starting a conversation with farmers about agricultural drought vulnerability. Initial discussions with a potato farmer in the Fowey catchment highlighted links between water scarcity, plant stress, consequent potato-scabbing and product marketability. This prompted us to consider whether it might be possible to create a map of soil vulnerability to drought that could elicit similar/different stories from other farmers. This map would act as a conversation piece to encourage participation and extend understanding about drought impacts.
The map represents the results of a spatial modelling approach using published national datasets. It was implemented using NATMAP soil data to develop an index of ‘natural’ soil-based vulnerability to drought, based on the concept of plant available water. This natural vulnerability was used to evaluate the potential impacts of future droughts by incorporating spatial data from the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology’s ‘Future Flows - Climate’ modelled precipitation and potential evapotranspiration (1951-2098). Combining these datasets enabled identification of areas of high natural vulnerability alongside those likely to experience a moisture deficit based on the climate scenarios in the ‘Future Flows- Climate’ datasets.
In this example, the conversation piece acted as a prompt for stakeholder engagement by representing the risk in a more interpretable way. The resultant conversations fostered a collaborative exploration of risk impacts with the objective of co-producing new knowledge about drought resilience and adaptation with farmers and other agricultural stakeholders. It also started new conversations and prompted new conversation pieces. This paper reflects on the value of this approach in stakeholder engagement for risk assessment and climate adaptation planning. We also explore the inter-relationships between various knowledges (lay, expert) and assess the efficacy of existing datasets in this process and across a range of scales.