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International audience; The processes underlying environmental, economic, and social unsustainability derive in part from the food system. Building sustainable food systems has become a predominating endeavor aiming to redirect our food systems and policies towards better-adjusted goals and improved societal welfare. Food systems are complex social-ecological systems involving multiple interactions between human and natural components. Policy needs to encourage public perception of humanity and nature as interdependent and interacting. The systemic nature of these interdependencies and interactions calls for systems approaches and integrated assessment tools. Identifying and modeling the intrinsic properties of the food system that will ensure its essential outcomes are maintained or enhanced over time and across generations, will help organizations and governmental institutions to track progress towards sustainability, and set policies that encourage positive transformations. This paper proposes a conceptual model that articulates crucial vulnerability and resilience factors to global environmental and socio-economic changes, postulating specific food and nutrition security issues as priority outcomes of food systems. By acknowledging the systemic nature of sustainability, this approach allows consideration of causal factor dynamics. In a stepwise approach, a logical application is schematized for three Mediterranean countries, namely Spain, France, and Italy.

International audience; Food and nutrition security is a persisting global issue and, in addition, food systems are now facing a new set of intersecting economic, social and environmental challenges. Recurrent socio-economic and biophysical changes put the sustainability of food systems at risk. There is an urgent need to develop knowledge-based tools to assess and monitor food sustainability and to identify pathways for food security and resource conservation. The systemic nature of these interactions calls for multidimensional approaches and integrated assessments for decision-making to guide change. This paper reviews social–ecological system frameworks with the view to conceptualize the sustainability issues that affect the food systems. It is argued that the understanding of the food systems as social–ecological systems, and inputs from the theories of vulnerability and resilience in particular, can provide the concepts necessary to understand and model the complex system dynamics involved in the multiple interactions between human and natural components.

International audience

39. World Congress of Vine and Wine, 2016/10/24-28, Bento Gonçalves (Brésil); International audience; In a global market, food companies engaged in sustainable development must now integrate the economic and social component. However the tools to assess it are lacking. Several theoretical frameworks have been developed to define social sustainability and its implementation. The attributional approaches, pathways or capabilities methods have emerged, based on a functional unit of a good or service along the supply chain. This paper proposes a new method to assess social economic and territorial performances of a food chain as a whole on a Territory. It is divided into four components: (i) dignity and well-being of workers, (ii) contribution to local life, (iii) fairness and integrity of business practices, and (iv) creation of material and intangible wealth. 50 criteria are used according to international, national or sectoral references. This generic method applicable to any sector of processed food products aims to identify where are the areas of improvement to qualify the sector as socially sustainable. An application to the wine Beaujolais and Burgundy wine was performed from surveys of 35 production and trade operators in 2014. The results show that the sector is particularly effective for the promotion of the territory, local life participation, loyalty and integrity of business practices; some improvement is still possible for the welfare of workers and the creation of material wealth. This method can be coupled with the environmental performance determined by the life cycle analysis in order to assess the sustainability in its entirety.

International audience; Crop models and decision support system can be useful tools for researchers, teachers, scientists, extension educators, policy makers and planners to help or support the application and evaluation of sustainable and long term alternative management practices. Sunflower is an important oilseed crop that has the potential to bridge the gap between the consumption and domestic production of edible oil in developing countries such as Pakistan. Limited research has been conducted on the application of the OILCROP-SUN model for the simulation of growth and development of sunflower under different environmental conditions, especially in developing countries. Field experiments were conducted in three environments to study the impact of nitrogen (N) fertilizer on grain yield and quality. The objective of the present study was to evaluate the performance of the OILCROP-SUN model and to determine the effect of N on sunflower for three contrasting environments. The results showed that OILCROP-SUN model simulated well for growth, development and yield of sunflower hybrids in these three contrasting environments and under different management practices that included several genotypes and different nitrogen fertilizer application rates. The d values (index of agreement) for leaf area index (LAI) ranged from 88 to 97 under arid, 78 to 85 under semi- arid and 71 to 81 under sub- humid conditions. Similarly, d values for total dry matter (TDM) ranged between 90 and 94 under arid, 81 and 88 under semi-arid and 90 and 96 under sub-humid conditions, respectively while the percentage difference for grain yield ranged from 8.5 to 21% for different ecological conditions. The model also simulated LAI, TDM, grain yield and oil quality well under different environmental conditions of Pakistan and further studies should focus on application of the OILCROP-SUN model for variable agro-climatic regions where sunflower is an important crop.

International audience; The use of plant protection products enables farmers to maximize economic performance and yields, but in return, the environment and human health can be greatly affected because of their toxicity. There are currently strong calls for farmers to reduce the use of these toxic products for the preservation of the environment and the human health, and it has become urgent to invest in more sustainable models that help reduce these risks. One possible solution is the transition toward agroecological production systems. These new systems must be beneficial economically, socially, and environmentally in terms of human health. There are many tools available, based on a range of indicators, for assessing the sustainability of agricultural systems on conventional farm holdings. These methods are little suitable to agroecological farms and do not measure the performance of agroecological transition farms. In this article, we therefore develop a model for the strategic definition, guidance, and assistance for a transition to agroecological practices, capable of assessing performance of this transition and simulating the consequences of possible changes. This model was built by coupling (i) a decision-support tool and a technico-economic simulator with (ii) a conceptual model built from the dynamics of agroecological practices. This tool is currently being tested in the framework of a Compte d’Affectation Spéciale pour le Développement Agricole et Rural (CASDAR) project (CASDAR: project launched in 2013 by the French Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Forestry, on the theme “collective mobilisation for agroecology,” http://​agriculture.​gouv.​fr/​Appel-a-projets-CASDAR) using data from farms, most of which are engaged in agroenvironmental process and reducing plant protection treatments since 2008.

Climate change, food security, water scarcity and environmental sustainability have all become major global challenges. As a consequence, improving resource use efficiency is an important aspect of increasing crop productivity. Crop models are increasingly being used as tools for supporting strategic and tactical decision making under varying agro-climatic and socioeconomic conditions. These tools can also support climate change assessment and the evaluation of adaptation strategies to limit the adverse impacts of climate change. In this paper, the authors report on a case study conducted to assess the potential impact of climate change on grain yield in sunflower under arid, semi-arid and subhumid conditions in the Punjab region of Pakistan. Experimental data obtained between 2008 and 2009 were used for model evaluation. The study focused on the impacts of incremental temperature change on sunflower production. The modelling suggests that grain yield could reduce by up to 15% by the 2020s with an average increase in temperature of +1°C, and by up to 25% if temperatures increased by up to 2°C for the 2050s. Adaptation strategies showed that, if the crop were sown between 14 days (for 2020) and 21 days (for 2050) earlier than the current date (last week in February), yield losses could potentially be reduced.

International audience; In Albania, the process of devolution of forests and pastures began in the late 1990s and is not yet complete. Theoretically, the challenge is to transfer management and property rights of 60% of forest and pasture lands from the national level to the local government units (LGUs). However, the implementation of this national process at the local scale revealed an extremely complex chronology, which is confusing for many actors. As a key to understanding, we broke the complexity down into three intertwining processes (legal, political and administrative) that are de facto the cause of many uncertainties in management accountability and property rights over forests and pastureland. Next we examined how the implementation of the devolution process is linked with local uses and village practises. Rather than simple dualism, which would set local tradition against modern legislation, we propose to go beyond the diversity of local situations versus the need for a common legal framework at national level, to promote embedded local initiatives and pilot projects to test the iterative national institutional design for forestry management.; En Albanie, le processus de dévolution des forêts et des pâturages entrepris dès la fin des années 1990 n’est pas encore terminé. Théoriquement, il s’agissait de transférer la gestion et la propriété de 60 % des terres forestières et des pâturages du niveau national vers les unités administratives locales (UAL). Cependant, la mise en oeuvre sur le terrain de ce processus national atteste d’une chronologie extrêmement complexe, source de confusion pour de nombreux acteurs. Nous proposons ainsi trois clefs de lecture (gouvernance, design institutionnel, droits de propriété) afin de déconstruire la complexité de ce processus et d’identifier les incertitudes ainsi créées en termes de responsabilité de gestion et droits d’usages sur ces territoires. Il s’agira ensuite de comprendre comment ce processus interagit au niveau local, à travers l’étude de cas de trois communes du nord de l’Albanie, dans le district de Lezhë. Nous adopterons une analyse systématique des pratiques et usages qui caractérisent les forêts et pâturages à l’échelle villageoise, afin de mettre en avant des usages multiples, sur des espaces qui se superposent et s’entrecroisent, en fonction de la ressource considérée. Nous montrerons également comment ces différents niveaux de pratiques ne mobilisent pas les mêmes logiques d’action, ni les mêmes échelles de décision et appellent à une triple relecture des enjeux du processus national de dévolution.