DEFINING AND IMPLEMENTING THE GREEN AND BLUE INFRASTRUCTURE IN GUADELOUPE: SOME MANAGEMENT ISSUES - CASE STUDY IN GUADELOUPE

This communication aims at discussing the different management theories that could be used in order to define and implement ecological networks in Guadeloupe (FWI), known in France as « green and blue infrastructure » or "trame verte et bleue TVB". For several reasons, the adaptive management theory is seen as relevant to analyze the social and political processes to define, implement and manage the TVB. May it be, we demonstrate that it is not sufficient. Small islands question singularly the adaptive governance as they further reveal its limits. Other management theory has to beintroduced. To reach this conclusion we will first make a literature review of adaptive managementand governance. Then, we will present specificities of social and political characteristics of Guadeloupe through the proximity and illeity theory as through scientific literature and empiricalobservations. Finally, in the last part, we will propose a complementary management theory that focuses more on strategic aspects of management activities

Agroecological transition : a viability model to assess soil restoration

Since the 1950s, intensive and specialized agricultural systems using a few select species and relying heavily on agrochemical inputs have enabled a huge increase in food production. However, in parallel, drawbacks appeared including biodiversity loss, greenhouse gas emission, erosion, and water pollution. Today shifting farming systems to mitigate soil degradation trends is indispensable. Using viability theory, we propose a dynamic model of the sequence of agricultural productions and practices that can be implemented in the long term to restore soil quality while respecting a set of agronomic and economic constraints. The paths to soil restoration vary depending on agronomic and economic constraints, the time available for restoration, the initial soil conditions, and investment capacities. Economic valuation of the minimum cost of restoration shows that the agroecological transition may be costly and that farmers can have difficulty meeting the costs, thus raising the question of how the cost of agroecological transition is to be shared. Recommendations for Resource Managers The mathematical viability theory is used to design a new model of farm management to assess possibilities and cost of the agroecological transition more precisely the successive choices of crops and agricultural practices intended to restore topsoil quality. This discrete dynamical model has an irregular time step corresponding to agricultural cycles and to dates of parcel release retrieved by using an inverse approach. The agronomic and economic constraints are mixed depending both on states and controls. The economic constraints are imposed on a monthly time step while states and controls variables evolve with the agricultural cycles what best fit the economic situation farmers must face. The trajectory selection criteria is the minimum cost of restoration. Optimal viable strategies depend on initial soil quality and available capital, time of exercise, constraints, and of crops and practices diversification. Computations were made with a software specially developed for this study using data sets collected in the French West Indies

Resilient and User-Centered Solutions for a Safer Built Environment Against Sudden and Slow Onset Disasters. The BES2ECURe Project

The Built Environment (BE), intended as a network of buildings, infrastructures, and open spaces, has to ensure adequate safety levels to its users in disasters that are unpredictable and quickly appear (SUdden-Onset Disasters-SUODs, e.g., earthquakes, terroristic attacks), as well as in those that emerge gradually over time (SLow-Onset Disasters-SLODs, e.g., climate-change related, pollution, and heat waves). Recent events have underlined the low BE resilience, evidencing the main limitations of current risk-mitigation and prevention solutions, i.e., underestimation of user-centered factors (users’ typologies, crowding, behaviors, others); building-centered strategies excluding neighboring open spaces and correlations between interconnected BEs; ignoring the SUODs–SLODs combination. To face these issues, the Italian PRIN (Progetti di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale) BE S2ECURe “Built Environment Safer in Slow and Emergency Conditions through behavioUral assessed/designed Resilient solutions” (supported by MIUR- the Italian Ministry of Education, University, and Research) intends to develop methods, tools, and guidelines to assess the BE resilience, promote risk-mitigation strategies design, and increase users’ risk awareness by using a holistic user-centered and cross-hazard approach. In this context, BE S2ECURe will take advantages of modeling technologies to represent, classify, and simulate the BE-users system (i.e., based on behavioral simulation models, BIM technologies), as well as promote users’ and stakeholders’ awareness through training solutions (i.e., based on virtual and augmented reality techniques). This work gives origin, objectives, and organization of the project, by underlining the impacts of the innovative approach to BE resilience

Macroeconomic Trends, Vulnerability and Resilience Capability in Small Island Developing States

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a snapshot of small island economies, which are scattered across three geographical regions, namely, the Caribbean, the Pacific, and the Atlantic Indian Ocean, Mediterranean and South China Sea (AIMS). We document and analyse their macroeconomic parameters, degree of their vulnerability and damages caused by natural disasters and climate change. Since most of the small islands have little resources to bear the losses and restore their livelihood, and houses and industries, the role of international financial and other supports in improving their resilience capability is reviewed

Agroecology Theory, Controversy and Governance

Industrial agriculture has clearly reached its limits. Industrial agriculture is not able anymore to satisfy the basic needs of the growing worldwide population while ensuring the conditions of reproduction of natural assets. New production models have to be designed to protect and reclame polluted and degraded agricultural areas. Agroecology is considered as a promising way to achieve ecologically-intensive agrosystems, since the seminal contribution of Altieri in 1995. Nevertheless agroecology has not fully emerged as a scientific discipline yet. Agroecology is more that a traditional scientific discipline because agroecology breaks the frontiers between biophysical sciences and social sciences. This chapter reviews the roots and evolution of agroecology in the first section. Here we propose a mathematical theory of viability to handle uncertainty and complexity within agrosystems. This theory allows to define a kern of viability in which the agrosystem stay viable in the long term (section “Scientific stakes: New frontiers”). However, agroecological innovations create new uncertainties and controversies that must be solved. Some solutions can be found individually while other solutions must by co-constructed using innovative collective actions and hydrid forums (Callon et al. 2001, section “Scientific controversy and uncertainty”). Such collective knowledge makes agroecology as the starting point of a representative democracy by setting up adaptive governance on territories (section “How to manage agrosystems in the context of global changes?”)