Greening the Car Industry: Varieties of Capitalism and Climate Change, John Mikler, Cheltenham Edward Elgar, 2009

Compte rendu d'ouvrage : "Greening the Car Industry: Varieties of Capitalism and Climate Change, John Mikler, Cheltenham Edward Elgar, 2009", Environmental Politics, 19(3)

Impact of parameterization choices on the restitution of ozone deposition over vegetation

Ozone is a potentially phyto-toxic air pollutant, which can cause leaf damage and drastically alter crop yields, causing serious economic losses around the world. The VULNOZ (VULNerability to OZone in Anthropised Ecosystems) project is a biology and modeling project that aims to understand how plants respond to the stress of high ozone concentrations, then use a set of models to (i) predict the impact of ozone on plant growth, (ii) represent ozone deposition fluxes to vegetation, and finally (iii) estimate the economic consequences of an increasing ozone background the future.In this work, as part of the VULNOZ project, an innovative representation of ozone deposition to vegetation was developed and implemented in the CHIMERE regional chemistry-transport model. This type of model calculates the average amount of ozone deposited on a parcel each hour, as well as the integrated amount of ozone deposited to the surface at the regional or country level. Our new approach was based on a refinement of the representation of crop types in the model and the use of empirical parameters specific to each crop category. The results obtained were compared with a conventional ozone deposition modeling approach, and evaluated against observations from several agricultural areas in France. They showed that a better representation of the distribution between stomatal and non-stomatal ozone fluxes was obtained in the empirical approach, and they allowed us to produce a new estimate of the total amount of ozone deposited on the subtypes of vegetation at the national level

The VENFOR project: wind and forest interactions from the tree scale to the landscape scale

International audienceThe Venfor project was set up in the aftermath of the December 1999 stroms that strongly affected European forests. Its ultimate goal is to provide tools for predicting tree motion in various turbulent fields representing the natural environment of a tree, relative to its position in a forested landscape (distance to the edge, edge shape, forest fragmentation...). The project is structured along four main directions: (1) development of a biomechanical model able to simulate instantaneous tree motion in a given turbulent environment; (2) simultaneous acquisition of mechanical and dynamical data in a homogeneous forest in order to analyse tree motion and provide a data basis for the validation of the biomechanical model; (3) experimental characterization and numerical modelling of turbulent flow in edge regions; (4) analysis of the influence of forest fragmentation on the atmospheric flow in three-dimensional landscapes, using information from wind-tunnel experiments, numerical modelling and analysis of observed damages. This international and multidisciplinary project combines in-situ measurements, wind-tunnel experiments and the development of numerical models