The DRIIHM LabEx

The LabEx DRIIHM is a laureate of France's program « Investment in the future » in 2012-2019. It has been renewed for 5 years from January 1^st, 2020. The DRIIHM was set up to run and lead the community of human-environments observatories (OHM in french), which it brings together in a single group, with their common bases and their diversity. It creates transversal links and fosters interactions favourable to the emergence of the interdisciplinarity required for the study of complex socio-ecosystems, while involving the various stakeholders in the areas under study, from the design of the systems to the transfer of results. The DRIIHM is a tool for promoting interdisciplinarity by organizing long-term, integrated research focused on a major "founding" event responsible for transforming systems.  Its operations are organized around the following actions:

• calls for exploratory research projects,
• inter-OHM and transversal projects where the comparative approach provides original knowledge or new concepts to the understanding of socio-ecosystems undergoing environmental crises.
• doctoral and post-doctoral contracts,
• summary works on shared issues,
• annual seminars on OHM projects and thematic seminars,
• transversal actions on data management and availability via the DATA-DRIIHM group: implementation of shared tools for promoting, displaying and sharing research data (GeoDRIIHM, PhotoDRIIHM, DRIIHM-HAL, Timeline, Chronosystemic frieze, etc.). The SO-DRIIHM project (ANR 2020-2023) will support these initiatives by raising community awareness of the need to share and open up data, and by integrating existing tools into the co-construction of an ergonomic, interoperable e-infrastructure offering easier access to data,
• and transfer to society, and in particular to the younger generation, by supporting projects and initiatives in environmental education and sustainable development: transposing the results of OHM research into teaching materials for primary and secondary school teachers, and disseminating and distribution of multiple mediation tools to stakeholders and civil society.

The DRIIHM is designed to facilitate interdisciplinary relations between all the environmental sciences :

• Ensuring that all disciplines, participants (researchers and teacher-researchers, doctoral and post-doctoral students) and their supervisory bodies (research organisations, universities, french institutions of higher education...) are fully involved.
• Involving civil society, particularly in the co-construction of systems and feedback on research results, to ensure that the research carried out matches and is understood by the stakeholders and political and economic decision-makers, thereby informing their choices for actions within their remit.
• By actively generating this open-minded attitude, known as indisciplinarity, which enables exchanges and interactions between disciplines and leads to the construction of interdisciplinarity capable of responding to the complexity of the systems studied.

The OHMs' activities are coordinated and monitored by various bodies, including a Management Board, a Scientific Council, a Conference of OHM Directors, a Strategic Orientation Council and project managers. The scientific and technical manager is a member of all these bodies.

The OHMs themselves have their own management and governance structures, designed according to the characteristics of each one. The most common structures are a Management Board, a Steering Committee and/or a Strategic Orientation Council.

The DRIIHM is open to all potential partners. They may be involved at various levels of governance: the steering committees and/or strategic orientation councils of the OHMs, the DRIIHM strategic orientation council. At the time of the project's selection by the ANR, 125 partnerships had already been identified for the entire scheme: around 60% with research units (77), the rest mainly with bodies or local authorities (17), administrations (12) or environmental management organisations (12).

Companies are invited to participate if they have an interest in doing so. This may involve supporting specific research to set up or test specific equipment, joining an information or monitoring network, etc. For the moment, these partnerships have been developed or are being finalised at OHM level (with Véolia, Klorane and EDF for the OHMi of Tessékéré, EDF for the OHM of Haut-Vicdessos, or Rio Tinto, Ciments Lafarge and SNET for the OHM Bassin minier de Provence). A privileged entry point is also possible at Network level through participation in specific themes proposed during the RPAs.

The relationship with local authorities (municipalities, communities of municipalities, departments, regions) and the populations concerned (residents, users, associations, etc.) is essential given the contexts and subjects of the DRIIHM's studies. The work carried out within this framework often deals with very sensitive issues (consequences of pollution and resilience, induced public health issues, efficiency of remediation, etc.), and it is important to make progress by informing the authorities and populations concerned, and even in partnership with them. The DRIIHM's approach to work encourages the inclusion of stakeholders in all aspects of the project, from co-construction of projects to the reporting of results.