Integrated assessment of four strategies for solving water imbalance in an agricultural landscape

International audienceAbstractWater imbalances are an environmental, social, and economic problem in many agricultural watersheds, including those in temperate climates. Structural changes are recommended because crisis management, through water restrictions, is not sustainable. However, the content of these changes is debated, especially because their impacts concern different sectors and stakeholders and are uncertain. MAELIA is an integrated assessment and modeling platform, which combines a multi-agent model with a geographic information system; it represents fine-scale interactions among water, water management, and agricultural systems, accounting for daily irrigation decisions on each field and effects of the corresponding water withdrawals on water flows. In this article, for the first time, we investigated the effectiveness of some of the most popular strategies aimed at solving water imbalances considering environmental, water management, and agricultural indicators calculated with MAELIA. The alternatives we assessed were (i) reducing the irrigated area, (ii) assisting irrigation with decision-support tools, (iii) implementing crop rotations, and (iv) merging water storage into large reservoirs. Simulations were run for the 2001–2013 period on a case-study area, the downstream Aveyron watershed. We show that, in this area, the decision-support tool and crop-rotation alternatives drastically decreased irrigation withdrawals and required fewer restrictions and flow-support releases. However, those two alternatives had different impacts on the environment and farming systems: decision-support tools cost almost nothing for farming systems and improved environmental indicators slightly, while crop rotations had greater potential for long-term environmental preservation but degraded local and farm economies in the current context. The uniqueness of this study comes from using a fine-scale mechanistic model to assess, in an integrated way, the impacts of politically debated water management strategies that were previously only assessed in terms of potential withdrawal reduction

Agriculture et ressources naturelles : de quoi parlons-nous ?

National audienceL'agriculture entretient des relations complexes avec les ressources naturelles, complexité due à la diversité des ressources qu'elle mobilise et à la diversité des modalités par lesquelles elle les utilise. Cette complexité est de nature à brouiller l'analyse des relations entre agriculture et gestion des ressources naturelles et à présenter un obstacle à la mise au point de systèmes agricoles protégeant ces ressources. Dans cet article, nous es-sayons de clarifier ce sujet en explorant la diversité des ressources qui peuvent être mobilisées ou impactées lors des processus de production agricole. En particulier, nous proposons une typologie en quatre classes des ressources naturelles selon que celles-ci sont renouvelables, recyclables ou dissipées lors des processus de production agricoles. Nous utilisons cette typologie pour mettre en évidence la diversité des leviers agronomiques et des niveaux d'organisation qu'il convient d'activer pour mieux protéger les ressources naturelles

From farm, landscape and territory analysis to scenario exercise: an educational programme on participatory integrated analysis

Tools and methodologies have been developed to enable integrated analysis (IA) of complex issues like agro‐ecosystems and natural resources management. They are based on interdisciplinary and often on participatory approaches combining, interpreting and communicating knowledge from diverse scientific disciplines and from stakeholders. In this paper we present the original educational programme built to enable students in agronomy to implement participatory IA methods in order to deal with sustainability issues in rural territory. In this educational programme students take a professional project management situation on a given case study. One of the originality of the course programme lies in its twofold objectives: building student capacities for carrying out integrated multi‐scale analysis of complex systems and providing researchers with an operational research device which facilitates the integrated analysis of new study territories. The educational programme articulates trips in the case study region and formation modules on project management, farming systems sustainability assessment, landscape multifunctionality analysis, stakeholder analysis and interviews, territorial diagnosis and narrative scenario construction. The main objectives and methods used in these modules are presented and discussed in the light of the outcomes of the implementation of this educational programme. Discussion is focused on the main educational and research issues of this programme

The major characteristics of environmental policies and agro-ecological technologies to be studied in Test case 2

Agricultural and Food Policy, Environmental Economics and Policy, Farm Management, Land Economics/Use,

Errors in the estimation of soil water properties and their propagation through a hydrological model

International audienc

Répondre aux enjeux socio-économiques, de l'exploitation agricole au territoire

National audienceThe problem of drought concerns scales larger than the crop or the field. To tackle such larger scales and the inherent numerous interactions, INRA is embarking on the development of tools involving interdisciplinarity and partnership. At the farm scale, to evaluate the economical impact of a drought in French conditions, a crop model has been coupled with an economical model. It made it possible to evaluate the capacity of adaptation of farmers to a drought and to measure the effect of drought crisis management policies on farms. At a regional level, where agriculture interacts and competes for water with other activities, INRA develops tools for short term and long term issues. To improve strategic water management, a model of estimation of the regional irrigation demand has been developed and a current study aims at designing an interface between the water manager and the various water users. To improve water planning, a keywork concerns the development of a model for optimal allocation of water between uses within a river catchment. It will allow for example the evaluation of new pricing devices.La question de la sécheresse se pose à des échelles plus larges que la plante ou la parcelle. Pour aborder ces échelles plus vastes et les multiples interactions qui en résultent, l’INRA s’est engagé dans des travaux de développement d’outils nécessitant interdisciplinarité et partenariat. A l’échelle de l’exploitation, le couplage d’un modèle agronomique et d’un modèle économique a permis de mesurer l'impact économique d'une sécheresse en France, en termes de capacité d’adaptation de l'agriculteur face au risque de sécheresse, et d’évaluer l’impact des politiques publiques de gestion de crise sur l'exploitation agricole. A l’échelle d’un territoire, où l’agriculture interagit et se trouve en concurrence sur l’usage de l’eau avec d’autres activités, l’INRA développe des outils pour répondre à des préoccupations de court terme et de long terme. Ainsi, le développement d’un modèle d’estimation de la demande en eau d’irrigation puis des recherches en cours sur la conception d’une interface gestionnaire-usagers contribuent à une meilleure gestion stratégique de la ressource en eau. Pour améliorer la planification de la ressource, un modèle calculant l’allocation optimale de l’eau entre usages au sein d’un bassin de rivière est notamment en cours de développement. Il permettra par exemple l’évaluation de nouveaux systèmes de tarification

Développement d'une méthode de construction et d'évaluation de scénarios d'usages du sol de grands territoires (application à la demande en eau d'irrigation dans le système Neste)

Les scénarios d usages du sol facilitent la planification des territoires agricoles en considérant l évolution de la distribution spatiale des systèmes de culture. Dans la perspective de construire et d évaluer des scénarios avec les porteurs d enjeu d un territoire, cette thèse propose une méthode qui permet de préciser une distribution de systèmes de culture, exprimée par un discours, afin de l évaluer à l aide d un modèle calculatoire. J ai développé la méthode pour traiter des questions relatives à la gestion spatiale et quantitative de l eau dans le système Neste. Il a été nécessaire d identifier une distribution de systèmes de culture de référence, puis de développer une interface permettant à l utilisateur de caractériser une distribution alternative des systèmes de culture à partir de la distribution de référence. Un modèle biodécisionnel spatialisé permet ensuite d évaluer l impact de cette distribution alternative de systèmes de culture sur la demande en eau d irrigation du territoire.Agricultural land use scenarios allow to consider the evolution of cropping systems spatial distribution. They thus facilitate agricultural land use planning. In order to be able to build and evaluate scenarios with stakeholders, this thesis proposes a method for describing quantitatively a distribution of cropping systems expressed narratively in order to evaluate it by model in a scenario approach. I developed the method in order to deal with spatial and quantitative water management questions in the Neste system. It has been necessary to identify a reference cropping systems distribution and to develop an interface to describe an alternative distribution of cropping systems from the reference one. A spatialised biodecisional model is then used for assessing the impact of this alternative distribution on the irrigation water demand of the study area.TOULOUSE-INP (315552154) / SudocSudocFranceF

Analyse frequentielle du climat : resultats preliminaires

* INRA Unite de Science du Sol, Domaine St Paul, Site Agroparc, 84914 Avignon cedex 9 Diffusion du document : INRA Unite de Science du Sol, Domaine St Paul, Site Agroparc, 84914 Avignon cedex 9National audienc

How do multi-criteria assessments address landscape-level problems? A review of studies and practices

Viewing the landscape as a spatialized social-ecological system allows identification of specific management challenges: integration of multiple views, multiple levels of organization, complex spatial-temporal patterns and uncertainties. Multi-criteria assessments (MCAs), which allow the comparison of alternative actions when multiple interests collide, are considered adequate to support landscape management. However, there is no consensus about how they should be applied and can integrate both multiple views and spatial dimension. We conducted an extensive quantitative and qualitative literature review targeting MCAs with a participatory and spatial approach. Our results suggest that (1) for sustainability assessments, participatory and spatial approaches endorse different rationales and hybrid methods are not so common; (2) within those methods, only scenario-selection methods (as opposed to design methods) can integrate spatially-explicit, spatially-implicit, place-specific, and overall values; and (3) current applications, which aggregate values ignoring their spatial and social distribution, do not coincide with the nature of landscape-management challenges. In addition, they give little importance to the structuration of information and to collective deliberation. We conclude that, in the absence of a good match between spatiality and participation, MCAs should, for now, be handled as insightful but distorted tools to explore and structure landscape-level management problems