Cattle beef farms and climate resilience: an investigation in Sardinia (Italy)

Adaptation to climate change (ACC) has gained attention of institutions and the scientific community in recent years. The Italian context shows a variety of climate resilience scenarios and low climate resilience extensively characterizes the island of Sardinia. Therefore, a large part of the island could benefit from the implementation of ACC measures. In this regard, green infrastructure (GI) has the potential to mitigate disaster risk and has become a relevant element of spatial planning, which can strive ACC in practice. A properly planned GI system can help increasing the climate resilience of urban, rural, or peri-urban settings. In fact, GI represents a promising approach to address habitat loss, soil erosion, and flooding in watersheds. The Sardinian rural context hosts a considerable amount of beef cattle farms and is one of the most important in terms of beef cattle raised in Italy. The scientific literature shows a certain lack of studies regarding livestock farming (e.g., cattle beef farms) and climate resilience in the Italian context and, as ACC has become crucial, we aim to fill this research gap, with the purpose of providing planners with basic elements to be considered when ACC strategies or measures have to be set. This research, which still is in its infancy, focused on a method to characterize beef cattle farms that could benefit from GI in terms climate resilience. Adopting GI with the purpose of improving the climate resilience of farms would have a potential positive effect on cattle welfare. We aim to provide and apply a methodological approach to characterize two rural areas where cattle beef farms are located. Such a preliminary phase is necessary to assess the ecosystem services associated with ranching, which will be addressed in future research. We found that the method is useful for characterizing the two beef cattle farms, while it is not necessary to plan a GI to increasing their climate resilience.