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Copyright of Boletín de la Asociación de Geógrafos Españoles is the property of Asociacion de Geografos Espanoles and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Context: Documenting trends in the health impacts of ambient temperature is key to supporting adaptation strategies to climate change. This paper explores changes in the temperature-related mortality in 18 French urban centers between 1970 and 2015. Method: A multicentric time-series design with time-varying distributed lag nonlinear models was adopted to model the shape of the relationship and assess temporal changes in risks and impacts. Results: The general shape of the temperature-mortality relationship did not change over time, except for an increasing risk at very low percentiles and a decreasing risk at very high percentiles. The relative risk at the 99.9th percentile compared to the 50th percentile of the 1970–2015 temperature distribution decreased from 2.33 [95% confidence interval (CI): 1.95:2.79] in 1975 to 1.33 [95% CI: 1.14:1.55] in 2015. Between 1970 and 2015, 302,456 [95% CI: 292,723:311,392] deaths were attributable to non-optimal temperatures, corresponding to 5.5% [95% CI: 5.3:5.6] of total mortality. This burden decreased progressively, representing 7.2% [95% CI: 6.7:7.7] of total mortality in the 1970s to 3.4% [95% CI: 3.2:3.6] in the 2000s. However, the contribution of hot temperatures to this burden (higher than the 90th percentile) increased. Discussion: Despite the decreasing relative risk, the fraction of mortality attributable to extreme heat increased between 1970 and 2015, thus highlighting the need for proactive adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Le Cozannet, G., Ait-Kaci, H., Colas, S., De Lacaze, X., Lecacheux, S., Mirgon, C., Peinturier, C., Garcin, M., and Oliveros, C., 2013. Recent GIS based national assessments of climate change consequences in France: methods, results and lessons learnt This paper reviews two recent assessments undertaken in France for evaluating national scale consequences of global change for coastal hazards and risks, namely marine submersion and coastal erosion. In a first approach, the potential consequences of climate change were evaluated in a direct quantitative way, however with high uncertainties in the final evaluation. Recognizing that uncertainties could hardly be reduced, a second assessment based on a multi-criteria evaluation was then undertaken. Geomorphological and marine factors that account for physical vulnerability to coastal hazards were evaluated for 21 coastal entities in metropolitan France. The evaluation was structured using the analytical hierarchy process (AHP). The results highlighted the fact that in some specific regions such as Languedoc-Roussillon (Mediterranean coast) and Pertuis (Atlantic coast), the population is expected to increase more than the mean average, while the coastal zone are also likely to be more strongly affected by coastal hazards. While such national scale evaluations in highly diversified coastal environments are still arguable, they may help identifying unsustainability in current trends and help defining priorities for future adaptation strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interaction between mitigation and adaptation is a key question for the design of climate policies. In this paper, we study how land use adaptation to climate change impacts land use competition in the agriculture, forest and other land use (AFOLU) sector and how a mitigation policy in agriculture might affect this competition. We use for this purpose two sector-specific bio-economic models of agriculture and forest combined with an econometric land use shares model to simulate the impacts of two climate change scenarios (A2 and B1, 2100 horizon), and a greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture policy consisting of a tax of between 0 and 200 €/tCO 2 equivalent. Our results show that both climate change scenarios lead to an increase in the area devoted to agriculture at the expense of forest which could have a negative impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change. The mitigation policy would curtail agricultural expansion, and thus could counteract the effects of land use adaptation to climate change. In other words, accounting for land use competition results in a reduction of the abatement costs of the mitigation policy in the agricultural sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the importance of Nature-Based Solutions for climate change adaptation (NBaS) is being increasingly acknowledged, very few studies investigate the status of these solutions in higher education syllabi. In an effort to bridge this gap, this study assessed the position of the NBaS notion in French Master's programs. Based on a survey questionnaire, several interviews and a text mining analysis of the Master's contents, this paper identified, localised and analysed the French Masters that presented links with NBaS related concepts. This analysis revealed that the notion of NBaS is far from being mastered. This might be caused by a conceptual misunderstanding of definitions. While text mining revealed that the building blocks of the NBaS framework are present, much still needs to be done for connecting them together. A combined analysis of the findings derived from this study led to recommendations to better introduce NBaS in Masters programs in the future. • The term of Nature-Based (adaptation) Solution is far for being well mastered. • Based on the existing definition, the concept should also be better explained. • Few courses are actually dedicated to climate change and how to adapt to it. • The complexity of the environments across scales has to be taken into account. • NBaS require a transition from silo approaches to multidisciplinary frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extreme or recurrent drought events are the principal source of stress on forests, impairing their overall health. They result in financial losses for forest owners and ecosystem service losses for society. Most of the forested area in the Grand-Est region, France, is covered by European beech, which is projected to decline in the future due to repeated drought events driven by climate change. Diversification is a management option that can reduce the drought-induced risk of dieback. Two types of diversification were separately and jointly analyzed: a mixture of beech species with oak species and a mixture of different tree diameter classes. Two types of losses were also considered: financial and in terms of carbon storage under different occurrences of drought events derived from climate change scenarios. We combined an individual-based model of forest growth with a forest economic approach (i.e., land expectation value or LEV), which we adapted to the stochastic context by developing a doubly-weighted LEV. The maximization of the LEV made it possible to identify the most effective adaptation strategies in terms of timber revenue and carbon storage by means of three different carbon values (i.e., market value, shadow price, and social cost). The results showed that diversification increases timber returns and reduces the loss in timber volume due to the drought-induced risk of forest dieback. However, diversification negatively affects carbon storage. Integrating the value of carbon storage increases the value of the forest stand, but only a high carbon value has a significant economic impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes French winemakers' decision-making process to adapt to climate change, and how the institutional and relational context of an innovation system, including a clean technological regime, affect these decisions. Our study used a mixed method research based on original face-to-face interviews with 92 winemakers in three French regional wine clusters that have been affected by climate change: Bordeaux, Champagne and Languedoc. We perform a logistic model to tests how managers' personal backgrounds, wine-producing company characteristics, and innovation system components, including cleaner technological regime, might explain the adaptation decision-making process. Our results show that economic variables have little influence on climate change adaptation decision-making. On the contrary, variables expressing the relationship built by wine producing companies within the Innovation System, their involvement in organic wine production, and the manager's personal background affect the decision-making process to adapt to climate change. Furthermore, many of the adaptation strategies rely on adopting cleaner production approach. Our findings show that the decision-making process depends on networks and clean technological regimes embedded in an innovation system, with regional and sector dimensions. • Awareness and adaptation strategies of winemaking companies differ according to regional vineyards, due to the spatial variability of climate change impacts • Decision-making process depends on networks and technological regimes embedded in an innovation system, with regional and sector dimensions • There are few links between adaptation and economic characteristics of winemaking companies [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Natures Sciences Sociétés is the property of EDP Sciences and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Aim  We assessed the relative contribution of ploidy-level variation and adaptive trait diversity to the diversity of taxon realized niches in a plant lineage with several ploidy levels. Location  A large number of sites covering a wide range of environmental conditions in France. Methods  Our material comprised a collection of populations from several taxa of the ‘fine-leaved fescue’ lineage, namely section Aulaxyper ( Festuca rubra s.l.) and subsection Festuca ( Festuca ovina s.l.) of the subgenus Festuca. This collection was assessed for several traits related to vegetative growth, investment in seed production, morphology and phenology. Environmental parameters that best differentiate taxon-realized niches were identified by multivariate ordination and logistic regression. Canonical correlation analyses were performed to relate plant traits and ploidy-level variation to these environmental parameters. Taxon differentiation was assessed along the first canonical directions of the plant descriptor (plant-trait and ploidy-level) space. Results  The climatic summer water balance, soil texture and land use were identified as the main environmental parameters differentiating taxon realized niches. Canonical correlation analyses revealed associations between plant traits and these environmental parameters, independent of ploidy-level variation. More specifically, the production of long and abundant rhizomes appeared to be an efficient adaptation to poor climatic summer water balance. In contrast, the ploidy level was rather weakly associated with environmental parameters. The marked prevalence of high ploidy levels in the collection suggests that they could have a competitive advantage in the range of environmental conditions investigated. Main conclusions  Adaptive trait diversity appears to contribute more than ploidy-level variation to the present diversity of realized niches for fine-leaved fescue taxa, although plant-trait variations were associated to some extent with ploidy-level variation. However, cytotypes with high ploidy levels could have been efficient colonizers and competitors, favouring the expansion of the lineage and leading to their present prevalence. Furthermore, adaptive trait diversification may have been an efficient factor in niche diversification for the present cytotypes with high ploidy levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]