Energy transitions and socio-ecosystem reconfigurations: mobilizing OHM to produce an integrated methodology
While climate change can be considered a global structuring factor, the injunction to make an energy transition is a founding event that takes shape in different ways in different territories. Studies on the local impact of energy transitions are mainly sector-based and monographic in nature. The challenge of the present project is therefore to go beyond this compartmentalization, by crossing the social, technical and environmental dimensions specific to each socio-ecosystem. The idea of a “Society-Technology-Environment” nexus will be put to the test by considering OHMs as laboratories for assessing the impact of an action on these three components. An integrated methodology will be used to characterize the reconfiguration of socio-ecosystems and the human-environment interactions at work. The team of 6 “test” OHMs is a broadly interdisciplinary one, with all the skills needed to understand the trajectories of these reconfigurations.
OHM: OHM Bassin Minier de Provence (Provence Coalfield), OHM Vallée du Rhône (Rhone valley), OHM Pays de Bitche (Bitche County), OHM Fessenheim, OHMi Nunavik, OHMi Pima County
Project leader: Sylvie Daviet
Connections, disconnections and reconnections in socio-hydrosystems
The relationship between societies and their hydrosystems can be understood as a series of connections and disconnections that occur in all fields and dimensions. Thus, the use of watercourses or water resources creates material or symbolic connections, development creates physical disconnections (dams) or social disconnections (invisibilized hydrosystems), and recent policies, which emphasize flows between the different elements and compartments of hydrosystems, insist on “reconnection” at all levels.
In this context, the aim of the HYDECO project is to use the variability of the situations proposed by the OHMs to test the effectiveness of the connection/disconnection/reconnection reading grid applied to socio-hydrosystems, and to re-explore the notion of connectivity in a critical and exemplified way.
Our hypothesis is that, beyond the variability of local situations, the trio of relationships appears consistently in the different environments concerned by the 7 OHMs involved, and that it proposes a fertile way of reworking the concept of socio-hydrosystem and its socio-ecological state, emphasizing both socio-cultural evolutions and functional interactions between all their components.
To validate this hypothesis, we will use two common threads that will run through the various tasks: the visible/invisible opposition and the notion of the tipping point. The project is organized into six tasks. The first aims to define the objects of study in their social and historical depth. Tasks 2 to 5 will explore the different dimensions of connections/disconnections/reconnections (vertical, longitudinal, lateral, flow). The final task will organize the project and enable the production of a synthesis book and/or special journal issue highlighting the results obtained.
OHM: OHMi Pima County, OHMi Estarreja, OHMi Nunavik, OHM Pyrénées - haut Vicdessos, OHM Vallée du Rhône (Rhone valley), OHM Littoral méditerranéen (mediterranean coastal zone), OHM Fessenheim
Project leaders: François-Michel Le Tourneau and David Blanchon
Food systems under influence: food, health and the environment in OHM
This project is part of a “Health Ecology” approach and aims to identify the variability and recurrences associated with the impact of the founding event of each OHM(i) on the relationships between environment, health and food. Through a retrospective and exploratory, emic and etic, interdisciplinary approach, this project proposes to compare, between our five OHM(i), the impacts of our founding events on food systems and health trajectories. Initially, a review of existing data in each OHM(i) will be carried out. Then, a qualitative approach will be used to analyze the links between health, food and environmental change from the point of view of the inhabitants of our socio-ecosystems. Finally, on the basis of an ethical definition of the risk factors associated with food, an ethical approach to the chains of contamination and their determinants, evoked by individuals or identified by research already carried out by OHM(i), will be developed.
OHM: OHMi Tessekere, OHMi Estarreja, OHMi Nunavik, OHM Oyapock, OHM Littoral Caraïbe
Project leader: Priscilla Duboz (OHMi Tesskere)