Resilience planning of regions: Case of Alto Duoro Wine Region

Resilience planning of regions is a main theme of research conducted by scientists from DIST – Politecnico di Torino. See the latest results published in the prestigious journal Science of the Total Environment by Vanessa Assumma and Marta Bottero contributing also to our SPOT project.

In the ongoing context of climate change, wine regions, particularly those designated as UNESCO cultural landscapes, are showing their attractiveness and vulnerabilities. Their value is exposed to losses, including the aesthetic, cultural, economic, and environmental dimensions, thus an effective response is more than ever needed. Wine regions continuously evolve, respond, and adapt themselves according to both endogenous or exogenous perturbations, and therefore need of building sustainable, resilient, and circular scenarios.

Decision makers are increasing their attention on the role of multidimensional models to support effectively both planning and assessment processes.

Particularly, the development of integrated evaluation framework can address this achievement. On the one hand, Stakeholders Analysis can help the identification and prioritisation of the key players of the participatory process, Multicriteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) can define sets of indicators and calculate composite indices for assessing the current performance of wine region, whereas mathematical modelling can support the prediction of future transformation scenarios. On the other hand, scenario building tools can effectively help local actors and stakeholders to define shared policy recommendations of preservation, enhancement and management of wine regions, according to resiliency, sustainability and circularity, as well as UNESCO principles.

The research work is developed in a real case study, that is the Douro territory (Portugal), where the UNESCO cultural landscape “Alto Douro Wine Region” is located.

For more details about this research work, do not hesitate to read the following publications:

• Scenario building model to support the resilience planning of winemaking regions: The case of the Douro territory (Portugal)
• A decision support system for territorial resilience assessment and planning: An application to the Douro Valley (Portugal)
• Assessing the resilience of socio-ecological systems to shape scenarios of territorial transformation