Following on from the TranStat initiative carried out around the St-Pierre-de-Chartreuse/Le Planolet ski resort in the Chartreuse range, the French TranStat team, INRAE and UGA, and the facilitation agency Val&Monti, organized a convivial day on March 22, 2025, open to all locals, around the question “what could life in the Chartreuse region look like at +4°C?”.
The Transtat team invited Chartroussins (name of Chartreuse’s inhabitants) to work togheter on the shaping of a +4 degree vision of the Chartreuse, and to think about the pathway the territory wishes to embark on in an uncertain context.
Featuring talks by researchers on various aspects of climate change adaptation, and design fiction workshops to imagine life, activities, landscapes and environmental conditions at +4°, the day was a new stage in building and reinforcing action in response to climate change issues.
The morning was devoted to talks by Céline Lutoff, geographer at Grenoble Alpes University (PACTE), and Stéphane Labranche, climate sociologist, independent researcher and scientific coordinator of the International Panel on Behavior Change (IPBC). Their two-voice speeches were orchestrated in the form of a mock interview, conducted by a climate-skeptic journalist who led them on social issues such as adaptation, or rather maladaptation of communities and individuals to the challenges of climate impacts. The question-and-answer session with the audience forged links between the scientists and the participants, and provided material for their creative and innovative capacity to feed into the design-fiction work.
The afternoon was devoted to design-fiction workshops, an active method that combines foresight, design and imagination to explore possible futures. Deployed in the form of a workshop, design fiction calls on collective intelligence to imagine the future of a territory or community by looking ahead together.
The 70 participants were divided into 5 groups, each working in workshop mode over 3 times: a time to familiarize themselves with and consult thematic cards representing the territory’s major environmental, socio-economic and societal challenges; a time for collective feedback and discussion on the most salient issues identified through the cards; a time for collective drafting of scenario(s) for the Chartreuse’s future up to 2050.
The raw results of the workshops were the formalization of 9 stories, based essentially on concerns about the management of natural resources (water, wood) and the regulation of visitor numbers in the Chartreuse, but also on the strong need of circular economy, solidarity and “doing things together”. These are the raw results of the workshops, providing the material for a future action plan.
The day’s sessions were punctuated by musical interludes by Benjamin Groetzinger and Vincent Duchosal based on their mountain experiences (only French version https ://www.benjamingroetzinger.com/orogen%C3%A8se ). The day was enhanced by a meal prepared by the Papilles et Papotes cooperative (only French version https://papillesetpapote.fr/) on the theme ‘Products and foods in Chartreuse at +4°’.
In conclusion, the Chartreuse Day at +4° provided an opportunity to further explore the issue of transition, beyond short-term ski resort strategies. By aiming for a medium-term vision of the region’s adaptation, TranStat supported local residents in thinking together about a vision of +4 degrees, in a context of accelarating climate impact.
