TRASSE - Trajectoires des Socio-Ecosystèmes dans les Bassins Versants d'Amérique Latine : Face à la Complexité et la Vulnérabilité dans le contexte du Changement Climatique

Description

The overall scientific objective of the project (Objective 1) is to operationalize a theory of change for the sustainability of Social-Ecological Systems in rural-urban tropical and Mediterranean watersheds and their vulnerability in the context of Climate Change. This overall objective will be addressed through five secondary objectives:

Objective 2: Provide an operationalization of social-ecological rural-urban watershed systems to compare the interactions of main variables and feedbacks in order to link them to social-ecological vulnerability analysis (RQ1 and RQ2).

Objective 3: Identify the role of multi-level governance in shaping over time the social capital and the sustainability potential of watersheds SES and analyse non-linear changes related to new policies and historical changes. (RQ1, RQ2 and RQ3).

Objective 4: Explore spatiotemporal changes in land use and ecosystem services to identify transitions (RQ3 and RQ4).

Objective 4: Determine and compare social-ecological trajectories in the three watersheds and how they relate to increased or decreased levels of vulnerability under climate change. (RQ4).

Objective 5: Identify which research boundary objects allow the co-construction of interdisciplinary scientific knowledge (RQ5).

These objectives will be developed through the investigation of the following research questions:

RQ1: What dominant theories of change explain the social-ecological trajectories and sustainability outcomes of rural-urban watersheds systems to date?

RQ2: Do SESs with governance structures matching environmental problems –polycentric vs centralised- exhibit greater social-ecological sustainability?

RQ3: How do ecosystem services trajectories affect the vulnerability and resilience of rural-urban watersheds?

RQ4: Is there a spatial and temporal variation of social-ecological sustainability that can be explained by different trajectories in ecosystem services in combination of conservation and development policies and cooperative governance?

RQ5: What research activities are needed to enhance interdisciplinary thinking in a team of multidisciplinary scientists?
The main scientific challenge of the project will be to develop a quantitative framework based on measurable indicators of both qualitative and quantitative information, ecological and social variables.

Once indicators are defined, they will be documented using a combination of field interviews, questionnaires, use of secondary datasets (e.g. national statistics) and earth satellite image analysis.

Technically, it implies the spatially explicit combination of qualitative and quantitative information on a temporal basis. This will be achieved through the combination of social-ecological qualitative and quantitative information on spatial and temporal basis, using innovative modelling techniques (Vallet et al. 2016). In particular we will use the Ocelet software (http://ocelet.fr/ocws/index.php?lang=fr) developed by CIRAD (Degenne and Lo Seen, 2016), which allows to model spatiotemporal changes in
geographical landscapes. It is characterised by the use of interaction graphs (graphs with interaction functions on their edges) to represent the system as composed of social-ecological processes, each involving several entities (e.g. communities, private farmers, cooperatives, institutions) distributed in space that are in interaction with each other.