Development of regionalised scenarios

This consortium, made up of national and international multidisciplinary teams working on the management of water resources for agriculture at the territorial level (drainage basins), aims to produce a synthesis of the research in progress on this subject in regions where irrigation plays a major role. GIEAU is particularly interested in remote sensing and spatial modelling tools to characterize the state and use of water in agriculture and how to get local actors involved in building scenarios.

In order to anticipate the response, in terms of both adaptation and contribution to mitigation, of agricultural systems in north-western Europe to climate change, it is necessary to propose changes in cropping systems and their organisation in the territory. The objective of the AIR-CC project is to create a consortium of complementary skills located mainly on either side of the Franco-Belgian border in order to optimise the preparation of a future long-term project on the management of climate change for agriculture, by anchoring it in the context of the region's agricultural systems.

In natural populations, especially for sessile organisms with long life spans such as trees, the strength and direction of selection can vary in space and time. This concerns therefore biological systems generally far from equilibrium, whose adaptation to the environment over short geographical distances (typically within a stand) depends on the interaction between the processes of selective filtering of genotypes (which in turn depend on the available genetic diversity and the spatial variation of environments) and the dispersal of propagules and genes. The MODEGRAD project will develop modelling approaches to assess (a) the effect of spatial and temporal heterogeneity on stand adaptation and (b) the impact of climate change and silvicultural management on the adaptation and adaptive potential of forests in the short and medium term, in order to facilitate adaptive and evolutionary forest management.

The development of the production and consumption of grain legumes can be a lever for contributing to climate change adaptation and mitigation, and moreover to the transition of diets. However, the services rendered by legumes to a territory may differ according to the production area allocated, the species grown, the management methods used and the markets. The MACHICOULIS project (for "Mitigation and Adaptation to Climate Change through the introduction of legumes in Occitanie: interdisciplinary design of a conceptual modelling approach adapted to the regionalization of agricultural systems") proposes to develop an interdisciplinary research approach in order to build a conceptual and methodological framework for modelling and evaluating development scenarios for grain legumes and the services they provide. Its application to the Occitanie region (southern France) will make it possible to identify strategies that could improve the resilience and mitigation of climate change in the region and, ultimately, to support public policies in orientating field crop rotations. The proposed framework will be generic enough to be used in other regions.

The ESACC-AGRO project proposes to analyse the interactions between the evolution dynamics of irrigated and rainfed agriculture and the objectives of water resources conservation in a context of climate change, in two contrasting drainage basins where other water uses are in competition today or could be in the future. Thus, the project aims to contribute to a better anticipation of the risks posed by changes in hydrological regimes and to identify mitigation and adaptation strategies for agriculture that could make it possible to reconcile farm viability, hydrosystem sustainability and agricultural carbon neutrality.

The objective of the OTAF project is to define silvicultural adaptation trajectories applied to a sample of forest eco-regions and at the level of the whole of France, for the period 2000-2100. It will be based on version 2.0 of the simulations carried out for the whole of France by the Forests-21 project. The analysis methods used will take into account several levels of uncertainty. OTAF will compare a mathematical approach with what experts say, and will make it possible to specify the contributions and limits of deterministic modelling for adaptive and anticipatory forest management at the regional and national levels.