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From a local perspective, the main environmental and anthropogenic components, which make an area attractive for regional planning, include landscapes, biodiversity and natural resources, as well as socio-economic elements. Climate and global change affect all these components, and therefore a particular territory, as an integrative structure, is at risk. The underlying premise of our research is that the impacts of global change will increase instability. Thus, the final goal is to achieve sustainability of communities and ecosystems at various scales and levels of governance.
The main research fields addressed by Cemagref and its European partners are: Water management: Our research activities, based on modelling, field and laboratory experiments, address both climate change impacts caused by human activities and adaptation to design, anticipating management strategies from local to regional scales. Rising tensions on water resource use, as well as related hazards, are also a strong driver for improvements in knowledge, tools and management rules and regulations. Biodiversity: With respect to both global and climate change, we address the ecological restoration field, for example breeding sturgeons to be re-disseminated in European rivers, and bio-indication, for example improving the ecological status of water bodies and forests. Biodiversity is also used as part of the environmental management indicators designed for further operational decision-making needs. Hazards and vulnerabilities: Water hazards are a major field of Cemagref. We deal with extreme events around hydrology, for example floods and avalanches, which are highly connected to climate change, and also with the geodynamics of debris, flows and erosion. Hazards are not risks; thus we have especially developed our skills in economics and social science to analyse vulnerability, resilience and viability to really consider risk management within basin environments. Landscape and forest ecology: The issue of sustainable development in a changing world raised questions about the impacts of agricultural and forestry activities on the spatial and temporal dimensions of ecosystems. Our goal is to document – and further to model – the complex “agro-eco-system” influenced by actors and practices. The management rules of the environmental system must also be planned within a context of strong climate-induced modifications to their status, but also natural growth of communities and evolution of the socio-economic dynamics. Ecology provides a consistent approach to understand the functioning and dynamics of ecosystems. Environmental technologies: Food safety, environmental preservation, workers’ security and health are major challenges we have to tackle and secure. To this end, we need to develop eco-technologies to implement production practices, to reduce the negative impacts of agricultural practices on water, soil, air, natural resources and biodiversity, and to improve the safety of workers in agriculture. Eco-design and eco-evaluation are the conceptual bases of our research activities in this domain. Integration and modelling: The increased importance of sustainable development requires environmentally-integrated dynamic models to enable understanding and anticipate change, consequently supporting environmental policy. We have developed computational solutions to support the design of increasingly nuanced models and the potential for the combined interaction of multiple models. The coupling of individual-centred models, global models, and physically-based models, within complex information systems, is the best way to address most of the main components of the environmental systems, with the final goal of limiting the anthropogenic pressures and achieving sustainability.
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