how can farmers deal with changes in the French coastal wetlands?
The ecological functioning of the French coastal wetlands has been deeply influenced by agriculture intensification during the last thirty years. Important landuse changes at large scales, provoked by drainage and crops, have led to loss of wildlife habitats (grasslands and ditches), acceleration of water flows from the watersheds to the sea, and water pollution. Local and strong conflicts between various landusers (hunters, livestock farmers, crop farmers, fishermen, oyster producers, naturalists, etc.) then emerged. On the one hand, farmers don’t want to hear about those new problems and at the other hand, are in the obligation to provide concrete responses because of the political changes (agri-environmental or nature conservation policies). Those public policies are mainly based on the subsidiarity principle, inviting farmers to confront their points of view on the problems with other stakeholders and to build new management rules. Those problems are characterised by high complexit
