Abstract
In the context of global change, the South of Gard coastal region in southern France is building up an adaptation plan in order to reduce vulnerability to several external drivers, including demographic growth, sea rise, and a new environmental directive from the European Union. However, adaptations which would reduce the vulnerability of some stakeholders might increase that of others. To explore transfers of vulnerability and their consequences with local stakeholders, we designed a serious game where players take the roles of sectoral planners in different places and on different scales of the territory. We organized a game session with 50 elected people and experts coming from various sectors. This experiment showed that adaptations on the local regional scale make it possible to cope temporarily with the pressures of global change by transferring these pressures to other sub-regions, other sectors, or even other scales. Analyzing the game session, we observed four categories of vulnerability transfers: transfers that were prevented by anticipation, transfers that were prevented by chance (non-purposely), transfers that were limited by a reaction (a posteriori), and transfers that simply occurred. Transfers prevented by anticipation required complex integration of local and sectoral adaptations. Urban growth linked to strategic retreat adaptations, which was identified as the major pressure, could be partly dealt with by trade-offs involving negotiations between several sectors in several places and at several scales.