Diversity of varieties and farming systems as an asset of Mediterranean oleiculture in a global change setting

ClimOliveMed aims to increase understandings on biological, economic and social factors for enhanced resilience and sustainability of Mediterranean olive growing in face of climate changes and to open new public spaces for increased awareness and collaboration among actors to design and manage adaptation strategies. Two main pivotal research questions will be addressed: i) how the invaluable asset of the rich olive agrobiodiversity can serve as a risk-mitigation strategy to face climatic change? ii) How the diversity of cropping systems and markets can serve as a factor for enhanced resilience and sustainability of Mediterranean olive growing?

1) Focusing on olive tree adaptation to climate change, the first objective aims to define the most relevant and easy-to-measure phenotypic traits and genomic markers for characterizing local genetic resources regarding (i) chilling requirements and the related flowering times and (ii) regarding drought tolerance in order to identify olive genotypes adapted to climate change
2) The second main objective of ClimOliveMed is to understand to what extent olive producer and actors of the value chains will be able to mobilize the genetic and phenotypic potential of olive trees to respond to climatic changes challenges. More precisely, we aim to: i) look at how olive growers manage agrobiodiversity in relation to climatic changes or other drivers (market forces, landscape management); ii) focus on how value chains governances consider olive tree biodiversity as an asset to support the adaptation process of the sector to observed or anticipated effects of climate change.
3) As the issues of climate change adaptation of olive-growing systems and olive tree varieties involve the management of complex socio-ecological systems in a context of pervasive uncertainty and plurality of values and perspectives, the third objective of ClimOliveMed is to open new deliberative spaces with all interested parties to reflect on the diversity of strategies for coping with climate change, and make explicit the differences in representations of the collective action problems. This objective will be achieved at the level of the consortium itself, at the territorial levels (France and Morocco), and at the global policy level.