July 2016
abstract
Responsabilité & Environnement
Où vont les sciences de l'environnement ?
Issue editor:
Claire TUTENUIT
Issue 83
1 - Evolving knowledge
After the Paris Conference, which science for the climate?
By Hervé LE TREUT
LMD-IPSL, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris
The agreement reached at the Paris Climate Conference (COP 21) has, rightly and unanimously, been hailed as a major success for French negotiators. However a restriction has been formulated, also unanimously: the conference has established a permanent framework that signals not the end but the beginning of a feat yet to be accomplished. The Paris Agreement marks the passage from a period of warnings about climate-related risks (now recognized by all countries) to the quest for solutions.
Thoughts about converging issues related to agriculture, the food supply, environment and climate
By Jean-François SOUSSANA
INRA, Paris
Over the past fifty years, the rate of increase in food production has tripled, thus outpacing the strong growth of the world’s population (multiplied by 2,3). This quantitative success has, paradoxically, not secured the supply of food and nutrition since nearly 820 million people are still undernourished, two billion suffer from micronutrient deficiencies, and another billion stand a high risk of chronic metabolic pathologies related to obesity. During this period, the world’s rising food supply has come from intensified farming practices for approximately 90% and, for the remaining 10%, from using 15% more land for fields and pastures. The growth in agricultural output has had several negative externalities: deforestation, loss of biodiversity, the impoverished soil, polluted water and air, rising greenhouse gas emissions. After several decades, these effects have augmented to the point of reducing the potential of agricultural output.
From ecology to ecological engineering
By Luc ABBADIE, Yann DUSZA
Institut d’écologie et des sciences de l’environnement de Paris, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Université Paris-Est, Créteil, Université Denis Diderot, CNRS, INRA, IRD
Restoring natural environments, adapting them to climate change, controlling the ecosystemic services derived from biodiversity, creating from scratch environments as alternatives or complements to technical solutions… environmental engineering must address these scientific and operational issues. Relying on concepts and theories from the science of ecology, it tries to cope with environmental complexity by producing environments that, evolving and resilient, can deliver sustainable ecosystemic services.
Where are the sciences related to biodiversity headed?
By Pierre-Edouard GUILLAIN
Directeur de la Fondation pour la recherche sur la biodiversité
and Jean-François SILVAIN
Directeur de recherche à l’Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD), président de la Fondation pour la recherche sur la biodiversité (FRB)
Pierre-Edouard Guillain , director of the Foundation for Research on Biodiversity, and Jean-François Silvain , research director at Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD) and president of the Foundation for Research on Biodiversity The loss of biodiversity has been confirmed, even though the consequences for human activities are still being debated. The sciences related to biodiversity are now focusing on the mechanisms for adapting to global changes and the simulation of plausible scenarios for the future, with a redefinition of the relations between societies and ecosystems.
The third National Health Environment Plan’s chapter on research
By Philippe HUBERT
Directeur des Risques chroniques de l’Ineris
The third National Health Environment Plan (PNSE 3) calls for approximately a hundred concrete actions so that everyone can live in a health-friendly environment. Its implementation entails improving knowledge about health and the environment. This plan’s diverse proposals are presented, ranging from the quality of air to the effects of endocrine disruptors, nanomaterials and electromagnetic fields. For taking into account individual exposures to environmental risks, the plan proposes an approach using “exposome”, a concept raising stimulating questions for research.
The place of the oceans in environmental science
By Françoise GAILL
Directeure de recherche émérite au CNRS
Environmental science still underestimates a key environment: oceans. The emergence of an “ocean community” through actions in France ranging from the Grenelle of the Sea, which assembled officials and organizations for discussing issues related to the oceans, to the institution of the National Council on the Sea and Coastal Areas (CNML). How has the use of the word “ocean” (singular/plural) evolved? How are the oceans perceived as a physical object, an environment, an ecosystem and a biosphere? After presenting the analysis of interactions between oceans and the climate as a major challenge, attention is turned to the validity of the marine environment and its scientific implications. Specific infrastructures are needed to study this natural environment. Maritime explorations have evolved thanks to light expeditions, such as Tara Oceans. Questions also arise about this environment’s nature and its rich potential in terms of energy, mineral resources and biotechnology. The ocean is a common good at the center of law: national (Leroy Act), EU (clean seas and the “blue economy”) and international (governance on the high sea, now under debate at the UN).
Economists and environmental issues
By Christian DE PERTHUIS
Professeur à l’Université Paris-Dauphine, chaire « Économie du climat »
From David Ricardo (1772-1823) to Robert Solow (1924-), “natural capital” has been regarded as a scarce stock of exhaustible resources, this scarcity limiting growth. This conception does not help us understand the issues resulting from degraded natural systems of regulation, such as the attrition of biodiversity, air and water pollution or global warming. We must move beyond this standard conception and take into account the economic value produced by protecting these systems. This entails expanding environment-related pricing mechanisms through taxation, market quotas or compensation. When economics tackles the issue of “environmental value”, problems of redistribution arise for politics to address through fair, efficient rules. In this respect, the climate question provides a practical field for work in vivo.
How is the environment changing economics?
By Antonin POTTIER
CERNA (Centre d’économie industrielle), Mines ParisTech
Three ways that the discipline of economics is – or should be – changed as its focus shifts to environmental problems are examined in relation to climate change and the loss of biodiversity. With regard to public policy objectives, the critique of cost/benefit analyses leaves room for an approach based on multiple criteria, thus reflecting the irreducible diversity of viewpoints. As for the means, the focus on economic instruments has led us to overlook how they are actually used in the field. This gap between theory and practice must be bridged in order to develop effective policies. Regarding the organization of economics as a discipline, individual research is no longer adapted, but a collective dimension is emerging thanks, in particular, to the simulation of complex systems, a task necessitating big research teams.
2 - The science-society dialog
Global warming: The prospects of relations between science, politics and society
By Jean JOUZEL, Valérie MASSON-DELMOTTE
Laboratoire des sciences du climat et de l’environnement, Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace, CEA-CNRSUVSQ, Université Paris Saclay
On 22 April 2016 at UN headquarters in New York, 175 countries and the European Union signed the Paris Agreement on the Climate. The approximately twenty countries that did not attend have till 21 April 2017 to sign this first universal climate agreement. Despite the gap between the announcements made by signatories and the stated objective of limiting the increase in the planet’s average temperature to less than 2°C (or even less than 1,5°C in comparison with the preindustrial era), this agreement’s universality is convincing evidence that the COP 21 should be seen as a success. This success can be set down to the commitment and efforts of the scientific community, which was nearly unanimous about the diagnosis, of political decision-makers, who grasped the issue’s importance, and of what are now called stakeholders, represented by NGOs. An analysis of how this synergy gradually arose…
The environment’s place in national research strategies
By François HOULLIER
Président-directeur général de l’INRA et président de l’alliance AllEnvi
The linkage between environment and development now figures on the international agenda, evidence of this being: the adoption of the objective of sustainable development at the UN summit in New York in September 2015; the world exhibition in Milan “Feeding the planet, energy for life”; and the 21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Paris in December 2015. Given their scope, the changes under way – whether in demography, the climate, environment, food supply or energy – raise questions for the vast spectrum of disciplines making up environmental science. With regard to programming research projects, questions arise about coordination and alignment at all levels, from the national to the global. To provide input to public policy-making, these projects draw on reviews of past research (state-of-the-art, metastudies) to shed light on future scenarios. They should also stimulate innovations.
Scientific controversies about health and the environment
By Marc MORTUREUX
Direction générale de la Prévention des risques (ministère de l’Écologie, de l’Énergie et de la Mer)
Pesticides, nanoparticles, bisphenol A (BPA), endocrine disruptors, genetically modified organisms and electromagnetic waves are a few topics that have fueled scientific controversies about the impact on human health and the environment. What underlies these controversies? What consequences to draw for risk-management? Concrete examples serve to shed light on these questions, in particular the author’s experience at the head of the National Agency on the Sanitary Security of Food, the Environment and Work (ANSES) in France.
The expectations of a firm, such as Veolia, with regard to environmental science
By le Dr Philip ABRAHAM
Directeur de la Recherche & Innovation de Veolia
Veolia accompanies its customers for optimizing the use of resources so as to increase economic, environmental and social effectiveness. To undertake the assignment it has set: “Resourcing the world”, its two levers of action are innovation and “co-construction”. With this leverage, environmental science takes part in working out solutions for broadening the access to basic natural resources while preserving them and seeing to it that they are replenished. To benefit from advances in environmental science, firms must integrate the latter in their organization, set objectives and help diffuse scientific findings. As a counterpart, firms have three expectations: be able to measure the environmental impact of their activities; find new approaches for reducing this impact; and obtain concrete solutions. A few examples illustrate these various points, which determine the practices and expectations of a firm such as Veolia with regard to environmental science.
At Michelin: Research oriented by sustainable mobility
By Terry GETTYS
Directeur de la Recherche et du Développement, membre du comité exécutif du groupe Michelin
For more than a century now, Michelin has been convinced that the mobility of persons and goods is indispensable for human and economic development. This idea, at the very origin of the firm, is still the company’s reason for being: to offer everyone improved means of mobility. Since this mobility is at the service of people, its negative effects on society and the environment must be curbed. This is the challenge that Michelin wants, now more than ever, to address.
Where next for global environmental research? The answer is Future Earth
By Corinne LE QUÉRÉ, Asher MINNS
Professor and director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research
It is likely that you live in a crowded European city. You want fresh air when you cross the road, you want to see that everyone everywhere has quality of life, you want to know that plants and animals are safe from extinction through local habitat destruction and globally from climate change. This world that we want needs a different type of scientific research to what has gone before. It needs research that can help solve environmental problems as well as better analyse and understand them. Future Earth has been created for scientists across all disciplines to work together with societies' experts to find solutions to the most pressing challenges facing people and the planet. Here we describe this new global organisation called Future Earth and what it wants to achieve in Europe and how.
A dramatic art for science?
By David WAHL
Écrivain, auteur de La Visite curieuse et secrète
Why did people for a long time hate penguins? Are we aware that penguins nearly became extinct in horrible circumstances? What does this history teach us about humanity’s relation with the environment? How to tackle science so as to tell stories, present environmental issues in the theater and share with the public one’s sense of astonishment and questioning? Following up on collaboration with biologists from Océanopolis in Brest, France, the author writes about his quest for an emotional construction of knowledge and its transmission.
Environmental science and theology: The exemplary Laudato Si’ encyclical
By Père Frédéric LOUZEAU
Directeur du Pôle de recherche du Collège des Bernardins, Paris
Never since their separation in the modern era has there so clearly been an urgent need for a new meeting between science and religion. Environmental issues and solutions should not stem from a single, totalizing view of reality. A closer look at the exemplary way that Pope Francis’ encyclical, Laudato Si' (issued on 18 June 2015), adopts an ethical, spiritual approach to the results of environmental science and ideas related to environmentalism…
Miscellany
The oil market at the crossroads of geology, economics and geopolitics
By Dominique DRON
Ingénieure générale des Mines
and Didier PILLET
Ingénieur en chef des Mines,
and The world economy in 2016, in particular energy and finance, has often been described as exceptional given: very low (even negative) interest rates; the overabundance of money put into circulation since 2008 (through quantitative easing) by the American, European and Japanese central banks; public debts swollen by efforts to keep the banking system from upending; deflationary tendencies; the drop in the price of oil (to a third of the price a year and a half ago); the sluggish economy worldwide (sometimes called “historical stagnation”); and the Paris agreement on climate change (adopted in 2015 at the COP 21), which calls for a drastic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Although the effects are not new in the concerned sectors of the economy, their conjunction for the first time in history calls for an exercise in foresight.
The oil market at the crossroads of geology, economics and geopolitics
By Olivier APPERT
Conseiller du centre Énergie de l’IFRI, membre de l’Académie des technologies
and The world economy in 2016, in particular energy and finance, has often been described as exceptional given: very low (even negative) interest rates; the overabundance of money put into circulation since 2008 (through quantitative easing) by the American, European and Japanese central banks; public debts swollen by efforts to keep the banking system from upending; deflationary tendencies; the drop in the price of oil (to a third of the price a year and a half ago); the sluggish economy worldwide (sometimes called “historical stagnation”); and the Paris agreement on climate change (adopted in 2015 at the COP 21), which calls for a drastic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Although the effects are not new in the concerned sectors of the economy, their conjunction for the first time in history calls for an exercise in foresight.