Co-designing Impact Chains to assess people’s habitability in the Vosges Massif (France) and adapt to multiple climatic risks

Climate change, compounding with non-climatic stressors, threatens the human habitability of Earth’s environments. The complex interplay of multiple drivers increases uncertainty, challenging stakeholders to make long-term decisions. Enhancing decision-makers' knowledge and awareness is key to navigating this uncertainty and developing effective adaptive strategies. While habitability has been recently recognised as an important condition in adaptation studies, its definition and conceptualisation are still under discussion. Moreover, traditional studies dealing with habitability mostly apply a top-down approach and focus on its material aspects, such as housing, food, and water, while overlooking local knowledge and needs of the affected communities, who better know what makes their place acceptable to live in.

The Vosges Massif, located in north-eastern France, is a mountainous region with moderate peaks, encompassing diverse ecosystems, such as alpine meadows, temperate forests, wetlands, agricultural land, and water bodies, all of which are sensitive to climate change impacts. Climate shifts, such as warmer winters, affect key industries in the area, like tourism, agriculture, and forestry. The region’s small rural communities are particularly vulnerable to these changes, highlighting the need for insights into effective adaptation strategies and economic resilience to ensure their long-term habitability and sustainability.

For these reasons, the Habi(Li)ter project, funded by Lorraine Université d'Excellence and supported by Eurac Research, addresses the challenge of understanding and enhancing human habitability in the face of multiple climatic risks in the Vosges Massif area. During the project, we will develop a comprehensive conceptual framework to analyse current and future habitability, focusing on the interactions between climate drivers (e.g., changes in snow and water precipitation, variations of temperature regime), and socio-economic vulnerability, (e.g., demographic shifts, tourism pressure, dependence on climate-sensitive economic sectors), and the resulting impacts on multiple sectors (e.g., tourism, energy, forestry). In particular, we will implement the Impact Chains conceptual models to identify and represent the causal pathways affecting human habitability. The Impact Chains will be informed by different data sources, including interviews with academic experts in relevant domains, risk storylines developed in participatory workshops with non-academic actors, insights from literature and newspapers, and statistical and spatial data analyses. Adopting a transdisciplinary approach, we will engage with both local academic and non-academic actors to co-define key dimensions and indicators of local habitability, integrating expert input, stakeholder engagement, and outputs from a survey conducted across the region. Furthermore, reference Representative Concentration Pathways and Shared Socio-economic Pathways will be downscaled to develop plausible future local narratives, including potential adaptation trajectories and their implications for habitability. The framework will be then updated to reflect future spatial and temporal dynamics, providing a flexible tool for assessing both present and future habitability.

Overall, the project aims to develop a comprehensive framework for context-specific, community-driven adaptation strategies in the Vosges Massif. Habitability is the key to ensure adaptation options which are centred on local needs, vulnerabilities, and socio-economic aspirations. This methodology can be applied to similar regions, like Alto Adige in Italy, offering insights for broader adaptation in mountainous and peri-mountainous areas across Europe.