Axe 3 : Dynamics and trajectories of environments and anthroposystems

General objectives and target environments

The study of environments and anthroposystems takes place in the contemporary context of global changes caused by processes linked to the imprint of societies on environments: climate change, decline in biodiversity, demographic growth and pressure on resources. The crisis situations that they cause initiate a transition that marks a breaking point in the evolution of societies. The ways of producing, thinking and acting are confronted with limits that require technical and social innovations, likely to lead to post-transitional stabilization and sustainable development. The general objective of the activities in this area is therefore to understand the functioning of geo- and ecosystems in order to predict their evolution and ecosystemic rendering according to the global changes that are taking shape for the years to come. The target environments are naturally those that concentrate the natural resources (water, energy, etc.) that are essential for the development of societies and/or that play key roles in the preservation of biodiversity and the ecological balance between the species that depend on it.

Research topics and approaches

In this context, the research topics concerned cover a broad spectrum that is difficult to define exhaustively. In the exact and experimental sciences (EES: geosciences, ecology, environmental chemistry, etc.), they generally focus on the major challenges arising from society's desire to mitigate the harmful consequences of future global changes: quantification and regionalization of the effects of climate change, prediction of the qualitative and quantitative evolution of natural resources (water, mineral materials, commercial and emblematic species), documenting the biological richness of ecosystems and the decline of biodiversity, highlighting biogeochemical cycles and their role in the interactions between the dynamics of materials (nutrients, contaminants) and living resources, developing management methods and techniques for the sustainable exploitation of natural environments. The human and social sciences (HSS: geography, history, sociology, economics, law, etc.), for their part, focus on perceptions of environments that influence the ways in which we inhabit the planet, produce and act, consider the interactions between societies and environments over the long period of human history, question the paradigms that interpret the relationships between societies and environments and that drive actions in favor of changes in uses and practices. Since only a holistic view of the systems studied can lead to integrated management and the sustainable exploitation of natural environments, the development of multidisciplinary approaches between SEE and SHS is naturally encouraged in the research activities of Axis 3.

The scientific approaches are based on the classical methods of the disciplines mentioned above, which are the chemical, biological and/or physical monitoring of functional environments (watersheds, coastal zone, lagoon, natural crop and plant system, etc.), controlled biology and/or chemistry experiments in micro- and mesocosms, conducting surveys of users of natural environments, reading sedimentary or historical archives, analyzing regulatory texts and/or numerical modeling. However, when integrating the trajectories of environments and anthroposystems, it is important to emphasize that the time scales in question are not limited to the contemporary time scale, but also concern, retroactively, the historical or geological time scales, or proactively, the future time scales that are presented in the form of scenarios. It is the confrontation of environmental dynamics at different timescales that often best reveals the influence of human activities on environmental processes. Even if the question of the anthropization of natural environments is at the center of this axis, the phenomena studied can therefore be entirely natural or societal in nature and/or be the result of an interaction between the two.

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