2020 News & Events

Mapping is an active and predominant activity in the struggle of indigenous peoples to secure their territories. Through their reappropriation of a tool historically used to invisiblize and dispossess them, indigenous peoples are reaffirming their existence visually on the map to assert their land rights. While such countermapping initiatives are quickly multiplying across the world, a global perspective on indigenous land claims and the major issues of their formal recognition is still lacking. This PhD thesis aims to fill this gap through the establishment of LandMark, the first global geographic observatory of indigenous territories and of which the author has been an active member from the outset. This approach involves responding to a set of scientific and political challenges as well as a set of related questions: where are the world’s indigenous peoples? What rights are they claiming? Over what spaces? How and to what extent have the transnational movement of which they are part achieved local recognition of their land rights? What issues are raised by their new use of maps and the aggregation of their data into a centralized global database? This thesis will also take stock of the data collected on LandMark and it will analyze their contributions to monitoring the implementation of international rights of indigenous peoples towards better understanding of ongoing dynamics within their territories. It will assess LandMark’s capacity to offer scientific support to the political claims of these peoples, and more particularly by highlighting the ecosystem services provided by their territories and by preventing land grabs.

In the context of climate change, as droughts intensify and as more areas are subject to high water stress, this dissertation focuses on how to manage the imbalance between water resource availability and growing demand in two metropolises of the arid West of the United States. Located in the Sonoran Desert and built on the model of the oasis city, Phoenix and Tucson take the socio-ecological stakes of water scarcity to the extreme. This study proposes to consider these two cities as laboratories for urban adaptation to climate change to explore competing modalities of adaptation to water scarcity. Using an urban political ecology framework, the goal is to observe and analyze the power struggles between stakeholders involved in water resource management in a context where the system of large hydraulic infrastructures underpinning urban growth is increasingly called into question. This mixed-methods survey brings together critical discourse analysis to deconstruct the dominant arguments and position-takings on water conservation, semi-structured interviews with water sector actors (institutions and environmental activists) and participant observation to question the tensions between discourses and changes in urban practices at the local level for adapting the urban metabolism to a world of less water. This thesis shows, on the one hand, that adaptation strategies are implemented by dominant actors within the framework of socio-ecological fixes in order to maintain the growth trajectory of particularly attractive cities. On the other hand, it highlights the role that citizen empowerment plays in the emergence of alternatives and shows that environmental alternatives play an important role in regulating resource control strategies and overcoming traditional resource-based management paradigms.

How critical is the situation today? What are the consequences? And what about the agricultural and mining activities, how are they hurting the protected areas? What are the more controversial decisions taken by president Bolsonaro? Is anyone protesting them? What are possible solutions? What role can the international community have?

“For the past decade, the deforestation has increased and the Bolsonaro government is putting the nail in the coffin…” says François-Michel Le Tourneau, CNRS Senior Researcher and Deputy Director of iGLOBES, to Alexis De Lancer on the Canadian radio station Ça s'explique. Listen to the full interview (in French)…

Sébastien Roux, CNRS researcher, received an award this year from the French Social Sciences Foundation for his work on survivalists. He presented his research, "Life after. Political and moral anthropology of survivalism in the United States (Arizona)" at the 8ème Journée des Sciences Sociales which took place on November 20. The theme of the conference is “Societies in danger. Threats, fears, perceptions, knowledge, reactions, resiliency”.

For his research, Sébastien came to Tucson at the beginning of the year 2020.

In anticipation of a November meeting to discuss a strategic partnership in three key areas (environment, space and data science) between the Centre National de la Recherche Scientific (CNRS) and the University of Arizona, Dr. Sylvette Tourmente, the Director of the CNRS Office in Washington DC, came to the campus, accompanied by Clémence Guiresse, the Program Manager and Deputy Director.

They were able to connect with Administrators, Department heads and researchers and discuss potential research cooperations between French and UA researchers, as well as tour several significant buildings including the Mirror Lab and the Tree Ring Lab. On Wednesday, they discovered Biosphere 2 with Deputy Director John Adams and Dr. Joaquin Ruiz.

The question of the relative importance of internal versus external factors in the regulation of populations is a lingering debate in ecology. Density-dependent phenotypic plasticity is one of the rare known examples of the combination of these two mechanisms. It can have direct or delayed effects on population dynamics that the study investigated using Western bluebirds as a model species. Indeed these birds manage to thrive through the colonization of ephemeral post-fire patches while displaying both intra-generational and inter-generational plasticity of dispersal and aggressiveness. Thus, Ambre developed an empirically-based mathematical model of Western bluebird local and global population dynamics that takes into account their spatially distributed, ephemeral and successional habitat.

Adaptive dynamics consists in studying the darwinian evolution of a population where survival and fertility of each individual depends on the state of the rest of the population. In the most simple cases (Dieckmann model without branching), the population's phenotype converges to a point that maximizes their selective value. Let's add a temporal dependence on that point: by following the optimum we can observe a population that is adapting. However, it does not fight indefinitely since after a certain period of time the population will have been delayed and so its numbers will be low and produce too few mutants. However, we can ask ourselves what a population that is "still fighting" would look like. I attempted to formally define this idea using results from the existence of quasi-stationary distributions of absorbing Markov chains. The problem is that here "infinity is an absorbing point".

Diseases transmitted by mosquitoes are increasingly significant globally, especially in tropical regions, and represent a world-wide public health issue. As a matter of fact, mosquitoes are vectors of several viruses and parasites responsable for diseases such as Malaria (438000 deaths in 2015 according to the WHO, 2020), Zika, dengue, yellow fever and the West Nile fever. Because of this, the mosquito is considered the deadliest animal for humans. The transmission of these diseases is facilitated by the mosquities' extremely wide range of distribution, exposing a large portion of the population to the risk of infection. The Chikungunya is one of them and it re-emerges periodically. In 2014, an epidemic started in the Carribean and spread to all of South America. Understanding the mecanisms of this spread will provide key elements to prevent and contain epidemics.

Following the publication of his new book, Chercheurs d'or: l'orpaillage clandestin en Guyane Française by Editions CNRS, François-Michel Le Tourneau was interviewed by Manon Meyer-Hilfiger of the National Geographic.

Illegal gold miners in French Guiana: a fortune at any cost.

They are called "garimpeiros". Those illegal gold miners, mostly Brazilians, who go to this French territory covered by the Amazon forest and get wages that are 15 times higher than the minimum salary in Brazil... Read the rest of the article (in French)...

Water is a resource often compared to oil, and a shortage of water would lead to an imminent "water crisis", permanent, local and global. From this alarming assessment to water wars, as predicted by some, is only a step away. And yet, the role of water in conflicts is debated. Though it exacerbates them, it is rarely the main reason, and can even be a cooperation tool if peace is sought. More than a "water crisis" because of a natural shortage, water geopolitics is governed by failing water policies, and by the hardship of maintaining hydraulic security, with global warming compounding the issue. But there are solutions to a "new water culture", but they still need to be put in place.

David Blanchon, Frédéric Keck, François-Michel Le Tourneau, Stéphane Tonnelat and Adriana Zuniga-Teran published an essay in Metropolitics.

What are “sentinel territories”?  Can we see early warning signs of environmental change? Sentinel territories as a tool to advance environmental policies. Read the article...

Kirsten Engel, Professor of Law at the University of Arizona, Esther Loiseleur and Elise Drilhon, both visiting interns at iGLOBES in the summer of 2019 published an article in the Arizona Journal of Environmental Law & Policy, 2020 Spring issue.

The 1980 Groundwater Management Act was created to control the rapidly decreasing groundwater of the state, but despite the extraordinary legislation, it fell short of its intended purpose, creating serious groundwater issue and impacting Arizona's ecosystem.

Forty years later, what should be done? Read the article...

Studies on “social license to operate” have brought insights on large- scale resource extraction and tensions in remote areas. Framing resource extraction through metropolitan extractive and post- extractive issues also allows to address aspects of governance— otherwise less visible—that could help sustainable decision-making in the extractive sector.

Drawing on the case study of two limestone quarries in Montreal (Quebec, Canada),  this communication will highlight three challenges related to the urban recycling of metropolitan post-extractive areas. Resource extraction impacts will be unfolded through the notion of “technical lands” (Galison, 2017)—the meeting points of contested relations between history, knowledge, material practices, and environmental change. Resistances to change will then be addressed through the “narratives of revitalization” (Baker 2014) brought forth by stakeholders. Conflict resolution will finally be framed through the notion of “critical landscape” (Scott and Swenson, 2015). 

François-Michel Le Tourneau, iGLOBES Deputy Director and CNRS Senior Researcher, interviewed Kirsten Engel, also a Member of Arizona House of Representatives, on "Water crisis, policy making and the role of academia".

François-Michel: Could you describe the situation of water in your state, Arizona?

Kirsten: This region is a desert, a very fragile desert and so the amount of water that's here is not sufficient to support a lot of the demands that we have for water. An enormous demand comes from agriculture but also from new housing development. We have a state which is a desert that has some native riparian surface waters, but at this point it is a very managed system where we are bringing in water from the Colorado River to supplement the use of groundwater. We are moving around water at a great expense and through a very complex matrix of laws and regulations, and through incentive programs to try to distribute both the water that is here naturally as well as water that we bring in from the Colorado river so as to supply the growth that you're seeing in this state. Read the full interview.

March 17, 2020

Hard decisions had to be made because of the coronavirus. Visiting scholars shortcut their stay to head back home during these trying times. Wishing you a safe trip!

iGLOBES is part of Labex DRIIHM, an interdisciplinary research program that studies the interactions between Man and his environment. There are 13 observatories in the world of which Pima County is one. François-Michel Le Tourneau presented the Pima County Observatory's framework, the focal object: the Santa Cruz bassin up to Eloy, the environment: a mining region in an environment that is increasingly urban and the founding event: the dispute over the opening of the Rosemont mine. There are five majour cycles that are impacting the ecosystem of the region: cattle farming, mining operations, irrigated agriculture, protection of landscapes and urban sprawl.

In order to be able to do a comparative study and see the evolution, a cartography of the territory needs to be put in place showing how it is occupied. After several visits to the UMI, Fabrice Dubertret first put together an inventory of the data from 1979 to today, then analyzed it and is now in the process of creating a database. 

François-Michel is the Deputy Director of the UMI, geographer and Senior Researcher with CNRS. His research is focused on the occupation and use of sparsely populated territories. 

Fabrice is a doctoral student in geography whose thesis is on "Making visible the invisible: the making of a world atlas of indigenous territories".

François-Michel Le Tourneau was interviewed by Patrick Boucheron on the recent forest fires in the Amazon forest, fires started in order to clear land for farming:

"Today we are in a complete dichotomy nature/farming Man/nature. It's either a field or a wild natural forest. And we don't know how to transform the forest to our advantage in such a way that it can be both an ecosystem that operates naturally and also gives us more services, more food, etc." More... (in French)

Patrick Boucheron is a historian and professor at the Collège de France, specializing in medieval history, and has been president of the Scientific Council at the École française de Rome since 2015.

February 19, 2020

François-Michel Le Tourneau, UMI Deputy Directeur, receives the 2019 Sophie Barluet award for his book L’Amazonie. Histoire, géographie, environnement. Created in 2010, this award is given to publications that show excellence and innovation in the field of Social and Human Sciences.

The ceremony will take place today from 6:15 to 9:30pm at the Centre National du Livre (CNL): Hôtel d’Avejan, 53, rue de Verneuil in Paris and will be followed by a debate on "The Amazon, myths and reality". 

Bernard Cazelles presented  his research on how to take into account non-stationarity and transient dynamics when analyzing ecological time series: using wavelets. Wavelet analysis decomposes the variance of the time series both in the frequency domain and in the time domain. This makes it possible to follow the temporal evolution of the different periodic components of the time series.

Bernard is a Professor in Ecology-Evolutionary Mathematics at Sorbonne University and Ecole Normale Supérieure, currently doing research in Tucson. He is mainly interested in explaining the complex patterns of populations observed in nature with 2 main directions being explored: theoretical works around the interactions between stochasticity and non-linearity and the effects of climatic oscillations and climatic changes on population dynamics mainly in epidemiology and fisheries. His main contribution has been the introduction of wavelet analysis in the study of discontinuous effects of climatic forcing on population dynamics.

David Blanchon presented "Tipping point and sentinels: monitoring, interpreting and managing environmental changes in southern Arizona". He explained using the new concept of sentinel territories to look at environmental changes. What is a sentinel? What is a tipping point? How can linking the two help anticipate critical transitions?

David is a professor of geography at the University of Paris Nanterre and currently a senior research fellow at iGLOBES for several years. His work has focused on water management in arid and semi-arid areas, especially in South Africa, where he did his PhD on interbasin transfers. He has led two international research projects in Khartoum, Sudan, on the transformation of an urban waterscape (2008–2012), and in Kenya on water-land nexus (2013–2016). He is currently working on “Sentinel territories”.

*David Blanchon, Tipping point and sentinels : monitoring, interpreting and managing environmental changes in southern Arizona

*Larry Fisher, Building capacity to assess watershed health, water quality, and the anticipated impacts of mining in Southern Arizona

*Brigitte Juanals, Communication and environmental issues surrounding the Rosemont mine project (Pima County, Arizona, Southwest United States)

*Luis Novo, Distribution and accumulation of metals in soil and vegetation surrounding a molybdenum roasting facility at the Sierrita mine, Pima County

*Franck Poupeau, Cowboy ecology revisited

*Anne Sourdril, SONATAS (Listening to the SOunds of NATure to undersTAnd global environmental changeS) 

While deltas encroached over the sea until the early 20th century, they are presently retreating, experiencing loss of fertility, decreasing food and fish production and increased flooding, while they are facing sea level rise. The future of deltas is alarming and millions of people are at risk because of unanticipated impacts of human actions. 

While soil erosion and downstream sediment deposition in river channels and floodplains have been major threats in the past centuries in the regions of the globe experiencing intensive land use and climatic crises, the 20th century displays a completely different picture in an increasing number of watersheds. Sediment trapping by dams (and the success of erosion control) has deeply changed sediment budgets and sediment transit at the world scale.  

The measures to be implemented at the delta scale, and solidarity at the watershed scale, are of prime importance in the perspective of the worst emerging regional crisis on the globe. Climate change must not be an excuse to get rid of human direct responsibility in river management. 

Jean-Paul Bravard is professor of geography emeritus at the University of Lyon. A specialist in environmental geography, he focused his research on rivers, impacts of dams, sediment and geoarchaeology of alluvial plains.

January 26-31, 2020

This past week Sylvie Démurger, CNRS' Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities International Program Director and researcher in the field of economy, participated in the UMI-Udall workshop, visited Biosphere 2 and met with UA professors and strategic partners to understand the role the UMI iGlobes plays in developing UA-France research opportunities.

On Thursday, François-Michel Le Tourneau took her, along with Jean-Paul Bravard, on a field trip south of Tucson, showing them particular points of interest of the region: the future site of the Rosemont mine in the Santa Rita mountains, the mining projets in the Patagonia region, the San Raphael Valley, the Santa Cruz river, the border wall in Lochiel and Nogales and the Tumacacori National Historical Park.

 iGlobes and the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy are again collaborating to put on an international seminar on resource extraction. Its aim is to provide multiple perspectives on resource extraction, social and environmental impacts, resistance and conflict resolution by encouraging communication and asking key questions: 

What are the drivers of resource extraction and in which geographies and political contexts is it most prevalent? What are the impacts? What forms of resistance emerge? 

For more details...