ICAD aims to re-articulate visions and projects for a more sustainable food procurement system at the scale of a territory. We define such systems as constructed by actors who coordinate their purposes, actions and resources within a circumscribed physical, cultural, economic, social and political space which evolves over time. ICAD main goal is to contribute to highlighting how, on the scale of a territory undergoing urbanization and demographic growth, a large set of stakeholders such as private caterers and their suppliers, as well as various non-profit associations willing to maintain agriculture and the natural heritage, develop sustainable food systems which integrate local production or other territorialized services in short or long circuits to provide food at workplace. Under this overarching goal, the project has three main objectives: (a) Establishing what ‘more sustainable food’ means to the stakeholders (including eaters) in institutional catering and how it is achieved ; (b) Analyzing the evolution of work in the socio-technical systems, their actual contribution to the desired sustainability, their interaction and the role of coupled innovations in these transformations ; (c) Supporting and analysing a systemic collective and territorial design process for the supply of sustainable food at workplace within a territory. ICAD will be conducted by an interdisciplinary team (agronomists, nutritionists, LC analysts, economists, management scientists and ergonomists) in relation to the actors involved in the Territorial Food Project of the Plateau de Saclay and its neighbourhood. This geographic area, located in Ile-de-France, has experienced a massive influx of employees over a short period of time. Many of these newcomers have a high education degree and a great environmental awareness which, combined with the questioning of globalized systems activated by the Covid crisis, implies a demand to redesign and rebuild the food supply chains to provide sustainable food at workplace. We are therefore at an opportune time to imagine the inclusion of new products and services for sustainable food in collaboration with territorial actors as well as actors from the catering industry. ICAD is split into four work packages. WP0 is dedicated to project management, interdisciplinary work for data collection and analysis; and dissemination of the project results. WP1 is organized to grasp the different ways that stakeholders understand sustainability, as well as the different criteria they use to achieve the desired sustainability. WP2 is meant to understand the evolution of the networks that contribute to a sustainable supply of food products and services through the study of the practices and motivations of actors (i) involved in food circuits to develop sustainable food procurement; (ii) involved in public policy support to such circuits. WP3 aims to support the stakeholders of the Plateau de Saclay and the adjacent local authorities in a step-by-step collective and territorial design process, the purpose of which is to debate and identify actions to be taken to contribute to sustainable food procurement at territorial level. This interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work is meant to draw lessons on this specific case to build more generic knowledge on the management of transition towards more sustainable food systems. In particular it will contribute (i) to explore the characteristics of the emergence and development of relevant coupled innovations to foster sustainable food supply systems; (ii) to identify the obstacles and the present opportunities to be seized to facilitate such systems in in a context of strong urbanization.

More than 300 million ha in Latin America are devoted to agroforestry (mixtures of productive and shade trees) where the impacts of cyclical events of El Niño droughts, background climate change, institutional turmoil and stochastic price variation of agroforestry goods is very strong. For more than 30 years, agroforestry areas in Latin America have been abandoned for other uses like cattle ranching or simply left alone because of rural exodus to cities. In this regard, agroforestry abandonment can be considered a critical transition of a social-ecological system. We chose here to examine the said combined effects in two pilot zones: the Central Andes of Colombia where institutional presence is strong but incomplete and the highland Amazonia in Ecuador populated mostly indigenous people where risk management is highly conditioned by cultural aspects and where women play the leading role in the management of the agricultural systems. The work is divided in 5 complementary work-packages that will collect time series of land productivity of the target areas from both remote sensing and local data, that in turn will be correlated to variation in the El Niño indices and used to fit predictive models. In parallel, an institutional analysis will be conducted to understand how knowledge about climatic and economical risk is acquired and used (or not) by the selected actors in Colombia and Ecuador. A special focus will be given to the dynamics of a pioneer program by FAO that channels meteorological information to growers, including El Niño conditions, that has been deployed in various parts of Colombia. Through workshops, the project will co-construct scenarios of the potential different combined effects of climatic, economic and institutional risks to lay the bases of an early warning system of unfavorable conditions that may lead to land abandonment in the target countries.

Strawberry, raspberry and cherry farmers lack solutions to control the invasive pest Drosophila suzukii (DS). Here, we will maturate the Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) targeting DS. SIT has shown great efficacy to control many insects in foreign countries. It prevents reproduction by wild females through their mating with sterile males of the same species, which are mass-produced, sterilised and regularly released in large numbers. Females that mate with them produce non-viable eggs, hence reducing the population over generations. DS SIT will be deployed in semi-enclosed environments such as greenhouses and netted orchards. Key initial technical elements have been reached, positioning DS SIT at a TRL of 4: the rearing process and pupae sterilization are mastered at a small-scale; a high-performance genetic line selected by the project leader greatly reduced female fertility when competing with wild males, in laboratory trials. This project will mature the technology to TRL 7 thanks to: (1) scale-up and optimization of the operational steps (production capacity, handling, packaging, transport, adult sterilization); in order to (2) evaluate various parameters of efficacy in operational conditions; taking into account (3) the integration and consequences of DS SIT on both farming practices and the surrounding environment; and allowing to (4) propose organizational scenarios to implement DS SIT at the territorial level based on stakeholders’ engagements. We will combine prototyping, field testing, in-situ monitoring, laboratory investigations and socio-economic studies. Laboratory-scale research will enable tweaking various operational levers to increase quality and effectiveness. By increasing the testing scale - from experimental greenhouses to operational contexts in commercial farms - will we identify practical challenges and impacts. A socio-economical approach will unveil how to deploy DS SIT for the protection of these three commodities. Strawberry, raspberry and cherry farmers are the future users and core stakeholders. Crops grown under tunnels or protected by nets are the targets of this project; due to DS abundance, control in open field is not a current goal. This project is led by the ambition to create a commercial entity for DS SIT services (production, release, monitoring). The operational trials will allow assessing the benefits-costs in view of large-scale deployment, both for industry, users and stakeholders. The SIT is an alternative to chemical insecticides. Due to a lack of sustainable solutions, current DS control mostly relies either on molecules subjected to temporary authorizations, or the costly manual sorting of infested fruit. Successful SIT actions nest into Integrated Pest Management strategies (IPM). Mandatory changes on pests and diseases management will include the fine-scale monitoring of DS and the adaptation of sterile releases to field observations. Technical support to growers and education is hence mandatory. The sustainability of the solution will rely on the active participation and regional coordination of users and stakeholders. To this effect, we will elaborate organizational scenarios of integrated strategies meeting their constraints. SIT long-lasting adoption through stakeholders’ involvement, will have positive impacts for environment, health and society. The SIT participates to the agroecology transition and a renewed relationship between growers and pests. Our transdisciplinary consortium has background in ecology, mathematics and socio-economy. All partners are involved in SIT pilot projects or in the pioneering of DS SIT and have worked together in the past. INRAE coordinates the project, closely with the economic partner CTIFL, with the common goal of developing a commercial solution. Due to their position in French agronomy R&D, partners are best placed to disseminate project results to different audiences including value chain actors.