ABSTRACT
Grasslands cover around 37% of the earth’s land surface (excluding Greenland and Antarctica) (O’Mara, 2012). They play a vital role in sustaining rural communities and cultures, maintaining biodiversity and providing a range of ecosystem services (Soussana and Lemaire, 2014), including sequestering and storing carbon in their soils (Lugato et al., 2014). A large proportion of the nutrients used to sustain ruminant production is provided by grasslands (O’Mara, 2012; Wilkins, 2000), making them central to food security in the context of growing demand for dairy and livestock produce from an increasing world population (Thornton, 2010). To sustain the role of grasslands within multifunctional, climate-smart agricultural landscapes (Scherr et al., 2012), the impacts of climate change on grassland production systems, and the efficacy of strategies for their adaptation to these changes, need to be better understood (Scollan et al., 2010). This chapter focuses on climate change adaptation for grasslands in Europe. However, the issues and challenges discussed are relevant to grasslands in temperate and Mediterranean-climate zones across the world.
