Overcoming natural disasters on the farm: Recovery, prevention and adaptation

Welcome back everyone to another panel session. In light of all the stories of extreme weather and emergencies around the Iberian peninsula and other parts of Europe in the past months, we’re going to take a closer look at the realities on the ground for our farmers. These storms and floods are becoming more and more common and frequent, and though we’ve talked in the past about the need to adapt to an increasingly erratic climate, these points of catastrophe are an essential part of the conversation. In this session we’ll hear from three farmers in Iberia and their experiences of enduring the constant storms and service interruptions of the past months. We’ll also explore how they are recovering from the disasters, how they plan to mitigate these events in the future, as well as a longer term view towards adaptation in the face of increasing frequency of events like this. In order to get a deeper sense of the impacts and challenges brought by the storms, flooding and erosion that our panelists experienced on their farms, I encouraged them to share pictures and videos of their land in the aftermath. Obviously these images can’t be conveyed over audio, so if you want to see what we were looking at in the introductions, you can see the video version of the panel session on the Climate Farmer’s YouTube channel or through the links in the resources page on our website at ClimateFarmers.org. So with all that out of the way, let’s jump into this month’s session.