Private gardens make up the largest proportion of urban green spaces and are also the most frequently used type of outdoor space. As such, they contribute significantly to the preservation of urban biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and services, and have been shown to be valuable for human well-being and health, and for promoting everyday experiences of nature for urban dwellers. The GARLAND project focuses on peri-urban gardens, including vegetable gardens, which have been little studied. The suitability of peri-urban gardens for biodiversity is determined by a combination of socio-ecological and environmental factors operating at different scales. The project proposes an interdisciplinary approach with ecology, sociology and geography to explore the social and ecological drivers, motivations and barriers for better biodiversity management in private gardens at both individual and community scales. The main aim of the project is to develop a comprehensive qualitative and quantitative understanding of the determinants of biodiversity within these peri-urban garden socio-ecosystems, in order to identify opportunities for biodiversity conservation. The project will also investigate whether some garden-related practices tend to increase householders' sense of connection with nature, which would be a potential lever for increasing general pro-environmental behaviour among urban dwellers. The project focuses on two sub-sectors of the extended peri-urban belt of Greater Paris (Île-de-France) with contrasting socio-economic characteristics. The data acquisition process is structured into three work packages. The first one will explore the role played by local public policies on the presence and profile of gardens in the peri-urban and rural areas of the Ile-de-France region. The hypothesis is that local choices made by planning authorities at the city level may conduct to heterogeneous situations in terms of regulations that may foster, or by contrast, hinder garden preservation. The second work package will study the relationship between householders and their gardens while taking into account the socioeconomic context. In particular, the objective is to determine the main householder factors influencing the proportion of vegetated surface in gardens and the heterogeneity of habitats, two parameters that are very determinant for biodiversity. The potential links between householders’ relationships with their garden and the biodiversity within these gardens will also be examined. The third work package will study how the diversity of flowering plants and pollinators within peri-urban gardens are influenced by the interplay between ecological factors (garden and landscape characteristics) and social factors (householder and urban characteristics). Flowering plants and pollinators were chosen as study models for the biodiversity analyses, because they are prevalent in many gardens and comparatively easy to inventory, and respond to landscape structure at a relatively small spatial scale. At the societal level, the project should allow to identify potential levers for action and to co-construct solutions with stakeholders to promote garden biodiversity at both the municipal and householder level.

How and to what extent the French food production system could ensure healthy and sustainable diets for its population while increasing its capability for self-sufficiency? From a political point of view, there is a growing demand from consumers/citizens for what is considered a better control of the food chain and its social/societal externality, for a more sustainable development with a re-appropriation of the territorial space at proximity. Political leaders now seem to follow and even support this trend, with political agendas. However, the goal of self-sufficiency is also criticized for various reasons, and, above all, the many dimensions of the food system, such as health, environmental impact, acceptability and self-sufficiency, are not necessarily aligned. We aim to analyze the tensions surrounding the implementation of a higher self-sufficiency in the agricultural production of foods ensuring healthier and more sustainable diets. We will identify the pressures for an increase or decrease in the different domestic agricultural productions, when aiming to produce more healthy and sustainable diets while reducing and redistributing the imports. We will provide an analysis of the conflicts over the different objectives (nutrition/health, environment and self-sufficiency) and we will explore the trade-offs on which an optimal food system could be based. We will also describe the prospective adaptability of the system to alleviate the tensions, for instance with changes in agricultural productions and transportation modes. We will analyze the regional and local contingencies and the extent to which agricultural socio-economic metabolism can adapt to support local transformation to better meet a new prospective food demand. This interdisciplinary research project combines both systemic approaches considering the population diets, the production capability and transport network at the level of the country and detailed case scenarios at the level of small agricultural regions. The approach largely resort on modelling, with optimization and simulation models to identify the demand for agricultural products needed for healthier and more sustainable diets, iteratively recalibrate the environmental footprint of the reshaped domestic production, and understand the key parameters that favor or oppose the matching of production system network to this prospective new demand. Therefore, the research project includes (i) analyzing the conflicts between nutrition/health, environment and self-sufficiency, and delivering compromised diets as scenarios of demand for agricultural products, (ii) understanding how agricultural production could be reshaped in the national network so as to lower energy and GHGe associated with transports, and (iii) understanding how locally production areas could be transformed with different land uses and livestock allocations so that the production would better align with changes required in the national demand. The project includes a strong dissemination program toward the scientific community, the general public and political stakeholders.

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.

The ECOTERA project aims at producing multidisciplinary knowledge and develop tools to allow local actors to explore under what conditions the eco-efficiency of agricultural production systems can lead to sustainable development trajectories of their territory. It will be carried out in the Brazilian Amazon, in the municipality of Paragominas. Indeed, global changes particularly affect the Amazon region, redefining the relations between agricultural and forest production and the environment. In the Brazilian Amazon, agricultural expansion over forest areas, which was the « engine of development » during five decades, is no longer possible. This breaking point imposed by strong interventions of the federal state, led to a drastic reduction of deforestation. In this now limited space, Amazonian territories need to plan and promote a rapid land transition while meeting increasing social and productive demands. Faced with this challenge, a new political discourse emerges, driven by agricultural leaders and elected officials. They want to promote the eco-efficiency of production systems, to become more competitive and increase value of products through a green image, allowing a new type of development of territories. In this context, Paragominas is emblematic, as it has implemented a "Green Municipality" model. However, a territorial diagnostic study carried out in 2012 shows that although the objectives of reducing deforestation are met, the knowledge and tools to promote ecoefficiency throughout the territory remain limited and the risk of segregation within the territory are high. The project is organized around a coordination task (task 1) and three scientific tasks which link the farm and territory levels. Task 2 evaluates the ecoefficiencies of production systems and landscapes with spatial indicators and mapping tools. Task 3 analyzes the geographical and organized proximities (groups of actors, networks) and how they influence the territorial innovation dynamics (construction and appropriation of technical and organizational models) related to eco-efficiency and adaptation to global changes. Task 4 will incorporate the results of the previous two tasks by building territorial development scenarios and linking them to farm level scenarios. In order to build operational knowledge, this process involves Companion Modeling (Commod), in which actors consider various options of public policies and development constraints and opportunities related to global change. This approach will build and explore strategies for territorial and individual action which can inspire other municipalities to reconcile the search for ecoefficiency and sustainable territorial development. The EcoTera project relies on a multidisciplinary group of fifteen French and Brazilian researchers who have been working and collaborating for most of a decade in the Amazon. To this main team, have been added French institutions of references on key approaches for the project: eco-efficiency (UMR ESO) and proximity (UMR SADAPT). This team also benefits from the strategic relay of CIFOR and of different scientific networks.

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.