This project aims at buidlgin biodiversity scenarios for savannas. Savannas are an important ecosystem worldwide (20% of land surfaces), are currently under threat and pose many difficulties in their modelling. Savannas are under the control of climate, but also of fire regime and grazing, which are sometimes more important drivers than climate in shaping ecosystem structure, function and dynamics. The consortium of this project groups ecologists and socio-economists from 5 continents, spanning all the diversity of savanna systems worldwide. The project will perform the following tasks: 1. Synthesis of savanna models as a generic conceptual framework for savanna ecosystems. 2. Synthesis of current knowledge on savanna biodiversity. 3. Synthesis of current knowledge on interactions between socio-economic activities and savanna dynamics in order to select relevant scenarios. 4. Analysis of the decision process in environmental problems. 5. Generation of biodiversity scenarios. 6. Identification of gaps requiring further research. This project is a unique opportunity to group such an expertise on savanna ecosystems and on interaction between science and decision-making.

Today, world-wide mobility is a part of the social texture of globalisation and international relations. It is both a cause and a consequence of globalisation, and the response of national and international political institutions is key to any analysis of governance and social transformation on a global scale. It is one of the tension points in modern politics at both a national and international level. By looking closely at international organisations, national and regional migration policies of different countries, ways of organising the living space of migrants and refugees and the transnational social dynamics of the structure of mobility, we can observe the phenomenon of migration from several angles and on different scales. This project aims to give a precise description of the political and social dynamics of mobility, principally by the empirical observation of the practices of those entities involved in the governance of mobility (countries, international organisations, migrants, refugees, networks). It also seeks to analyse the représentations linked to these practices, and the devices of regulation, ideology and identity politics on which they are based. The researchers involved in this project favour an empirical approach together with a systematization following the models of political science, sociology, anthropology and political economy. They have also chosen to link the subjects of their fundamental research to contemporary political and social issues, and to start from scientific reflection on public action, both national and international, its norms and its principles in relation to mobility. The first line of this study is concerned with practice and représentations in the management of mobility in international politics. It aims to question the notion of the global governance of mobility, including economic migration and the tide of refugees. International organisations, their interaction with non-governmental players in policies on international migration and the tide of refugees are at the heart of political measures made up of speeches and practice. The overall methodology of this task is that of the sociology of international relations, and aims to analyse the “international” facts built up by different players around international mobility as social facts. The second line of study bears on the political stakes in the regional governance of migration in two distinct areas: Europe and the Middle East. This involves determining the place of an individual country in the governance of mobility on a regional scale, in Europe in particular, between the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. “Governance” hovers between integration and “the restatement of sovereignty” in the management of international migration, notably at a time of economic and financial crisis, and we study the consequences of this “supremacist reaction” for the mobility of individuals. The third line of study in this project is an ethnographical approach to both institutional and informal camps of refugees, migrants and/or asylum seekers, looking closely at the social transformations at work in these transnational social spaces. It bears on the modes of governance used by humanitarian players in the context of crises, and also on the agency of the population involved, and analyses this through the structure of space for relegation and /or confinement on a global scale. The last line of study is a reflection on the future of the most visible contemporary measure for limiting mobility – walls. It explores political scenarios such as the opening of frontiers and the liberalisation of mobility, and is a theoretical continuation of the knowledge and analysis deployed within the framework of this project.

In a context of climate change, dwindling fossil resources and mild economic growth, urban sustainability has become a key policy issue. Given the complexity of modern urban areas, designing sustainable policies calls for more than sheer expert knowledge. This is especially true of transport or land use policies, because of the strong interplay between the land use and the transportation systems. Policies that seem perfectly sound intuitively may ultimately yield undesirable effects because of this connection, which is extremely hard to apprehend without the help of numerical simulations. Land use and transport integrated (LUTI) modeling thus offers invaluable analysis tools for planners working on transportation and urban projects. Yet, very few local authorities in charge of planning make use of these strategic models. The explanation lies first in the difficulty to calibrate these models, second in the lack of confidence in their results, which itself stems from the absence of any well-defined validation procedure. This proposal aims to foster the use of LUTI models for the design and evaluation of land use and transport policies by addressing these two impediments. This involves: (a) defining a calibration methodology and developing relevant and efficient algorithms to facilitate the parameter estimation of LUTI models; (b) defining a validation methodology, in both the historical and urban economics senses, and developing the related algorithms. In both cases, analyzing the uncertainty that may arise from either the data or the underlying equations, quantifying how these uncertainties propagate in the model, and performing sensitivity analysis to determine the relevance of the various data and model parameters are of major importance. Completing these various tasks would make LUTI models easier to implement, and greatly enhance the confidence in their results. Three LUTI models will serve as sample to test the methodologies that will be developed in the CITiES project: TRANUS, UrbanSim, and PIRANDELLO. They are quite representative of LUTI models, with two equilibrium models and one activity-based model (or transition model). TRANUS and UrbanSim are open source and also the most largely applied models worldwide, while PIRANDELLO is the only operating model developed in France. The study areas are the Grenoble region for TRANUS, the Lyon region for UrbanSim and the Paris region for PIRANDELLO, which offer different local contexts. The consortium also intends to support the dissemination of LUTI models and CITiES results through significant interactions with policy-makers and end users, in the form of workshops and information meetings. Besides the scientific difficulties raised by the development of adequate methodologies, another important issue lies in the significant amount of data that is needed to perform the historical validation steps for the case studies. Data acquisition and post treatment will therefore be a task in itself. To successfully carry out the CITiES project, the consortium can draw on two main strengths: • its unique panel of experts in urban modeling, urban planning, mathematics and computer science, which is to be the cornerstone of the development of innovative tools for the calibration and the management of uncertainties in LUTI models; • the significant experience of most partners with LUTI modeling. The partnership with the IAU îdF and the AURG will also prove extremely fruitful, considering both the data issues and the firm intent to interact with end users. If the pluridisciplinary character of the project is clearly an asset, it may also constitute a more important difficulty in terms of communication between team members; particular care will be paid in the project management to ensure smooth exchanges of information and knowledge and mutual understanding between the different scientific communities involved in the project.