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Urban landscapes face significant challenges, as they must transform towards sustainability while remaining resilient. Urban landscape transformation is a complex task for landscape designers. They must not only create new solutions for landscapes but also ensure that their proposals are capable to deliver and maintain key ecosystems services over time and especially after shocks. In practice, designers must increase their dialogue with scientists and engineers to include expertise on ecosystems functions and services. Through science-design feedback loops, designers can be challenged by scientists’ models and simulations and thus create informed designs. Lastly, stakeholders also catalyse key steps of such a process, in particular by providing local expertise as well as co-constructing and validating the informed designs. In this paper, we introduce a roadmap, centred on an intensive interdisciplinary dialogue – a science-design loop. We illustrate the relevance of this roadmap with the analysis of five case studies about flood management and blue-green infrastructures. We analyse them according to the main steps of our roadmap and with the support of key interviews with experienced practitioners. First, this analysis provides an overview of best practices and challenges in the current urban landscape design world. But above all, we show the relevance of the proposed roadmap to muster science and design in a balanced manner in urban transformations., Socio-Environmental Systems Modelling, 5, ISSN:2663-3027

Environmental Research Letters, 18 (5), ISSN:1748-9326, ISSN:1748-9318

Conservation and ethical consideration for animal welfare in the wild appear to be synergetic because they both care for non-human animals. However, many practices such as culling seem to achieve conservation purposes but at the cost of producing a lot of wild-animal suffering, antagonizing conservationists and animal rights advocates. To explore this tension, we model the suffering of animals in wild ecosystems by resorting to classical population dynamics equations and using death rates as a metric of suffering. Our results show that, depending on the structure and parameters of the ecosystem, animal rights advocates and conservationists can have either opposing or compatible interests, where conserving species can go hand in hand with reducing the overall suffering. These models contribute to the concrete question of how to cope with suffering in the wild and may help ecosystem managers who are regularly confronted with interventions in the wild.

International audience; Agent-based simulation has been extensively used to study opinion dynamics. However, the vast majority of the existing models have been limited to extremely abstract and simplified representations of the diffusion process, which impairs the realism of the simulations and disables the understanding of the reasons for the shift of an actor’s opinion. This paper presents a generic framework implemented in the GAMA platform allowing to explicitly represent exchanges of arguments between actors in a context of an opinion dynamic model. More precisely, we propose to formalize the inner attitude towards an opinion of each agent as an argumentation graph and give them the possibility to share arguments with other agents. We present an application of the framework to study the evolution of the vegetarian diet at a city level.

Open Code; International audience; This paper introduces a generic agent-based model simulating the exchange and the diffusion of pro and con arguments. It is applied to the case of the diffusion of vegetarian diets in the context of a potential emergence of a second nutrition transition. To this day, agent-based simulation has been extensively used to study opinion dynamics. However, the vast majority of existing models have been limited to extremely abstract and simplified representations of the diffusion process. These simplifications impairs the realism of the simulations and disables the understanding of the reasons for the shift of an actor's opinion. The generic model presented here explicitly represents exchanges of arguments between actors in the context of an opinion dynamic model. In particular, the inner attitude towards an opinion of each agent is formalized as an argumentation graph and each agent can share arguments with other agents. Simulation experiments show that introducing attacks between arguments and a limitation of the number of arguments mobilized by agents has a strong impact on the evolution of the agents' opinion. We also highlight that when a new argument is introduced into the system, the quantity and the profile of the agents receiving the new argument will impact the evolution of the overall opinion. Finally, the application of this model to vegetarian diet adoption seems consistent with historical food behaviour dynamics observed during crises.

Ecosystems support the adaptation of societies to global changes through their contributions to people's quality of life. Ecosystem-based adaptation (EBA) implementation remains a challenge and will require changes of practices, structures and processes underpinning human and nature interactions, also considered as co-production of nature’s contributions to adaptation (NCA). We analysed the levers required to implement EBA to reach a future desired by stakeholders of a mountain social-ecological system in the French Alps. Using a participatory backcasting scenario approach and a serious game, local stakeholders were invited to design a desired vision for their region in 2040 and reflect on strategies and levers for reaching it. We analysed co-production actions required to achieve adaptation objectives aligned with the vision. We then assessed how local communities can leverage these actions to navigate a desired adaptation pathway. EBA and landscape multifunctionality are critical to achieve stakeholders’ vision. EBA require substantial adjustments, transformations, or new co-production actions, but natural capital was not a limiting factor for adaptation. Synergies among multiple co-production actions create windows of opportunity for local communities to achieve their vision through the combination of social levers. However, most powerful levers, like collaborative decision-making or common strategy design, appeared the most difficult to activate. EBA is mainly constrained here by social barriers reflecting the lack of collaboration and communication among stakeholders. Recognizing potential contributions of ecosystems to adaptation by maintaining and developing NCA supply can help communities to re-structure and re-think their local social-ecological system to achieve desired and sustainable pathways.

International audience; Landscape management involves tackling both systemic and social complexity: the former due to multiple interacting entities, the latter due to incommensurable knowledge and value systems of stakeholders. Current practice in landscape management makes wide use of participatory methods, which helps increase the breadth of our understanding of sustainability problems, e.g. biodiversity loss, agricultural pest damages or water penury. However, this practice also often offers a flat, harmonized picture of the landscape, which precludes observing ambiguities and out-of-the-box arguments and ideas for overcoming problems. In this article, we analyzed two research settings that tended to surface and formalize incommensurability between stakeholders regarding the sustainable management of landscapes – one focused on quantitative water management, the other on agroecological pest control. The objective was to investigate if and to which extent these ‘opening-up’ exercises, based on a deliberative rationale, were beneficial to landscape sustainability. The results indicated that in both cases, participants strove to position their knowledge and values relative to others: this way, they delineated a negotiation and learning space to invest in, and enhanced the quality of their arguments, allowing new insights on the focus issues. These findings offer an operational counterpoint to the prevalence of ‘closing-down’ approaches in landscape approaches. In the general context of ecological crisis, these examples promote methodological options that offer space to disruptive narratives, as well as tools that allow a reflexive use of the scientific knowledge, models and indicators traditionally used in sustainability appraisals, without discarding them.

International audience; AbstractHabitat management is increasingly considered as a promising approach to favor the ecosystem service of biological control by enhancing natural enemies. However, habitat management, whether at local or landscape scale, remains very uncertain for farmers. Interactions between ecological processes and agricultural practices are indeed uncertain and site-specific, which makes implementation difficult. Thus, prospecting innovations based on habitat management may benefit from integrating local stakeholders and their knowledge. Our objective is to explore with both local and scientific stakeholders how they perceive agricultural practices, ecological processes, and services related to biological pest control and habitat management. We conducted a participatory Bayesian Network modeling approach with five stakeholders in Southwest France around apple orchard cultivation. We co-constructed such Bayesian Networks based on participants’ knowledge. We explored scenarios favoring natural enemies and habitat manipulation with each participant’s Bayesian Network. We compared how different stakeholders perceive the impact of each scenario on the biological control ecosystem service. Our results indicate that a landscape with a high proportion of semi-natural habitats does not translate into significant biological control for most participants even though some stakeholders perceive a significant impact on generalist predators’ activity within orchards. For these local stakeholders, habitat management at the orchard level such as inter-row vegetation seems currently more promising than at the landscape scale. Here, we show for the first time that the use of Bayesian modeling in a participatory manner can give precious insights into the most promising perspectives on habitat management at different scales. These different local perspectives suggest in particular that further dialogue between ecologists and local stakeholders should be sought about inter-row habitat management as the most promising practice to foster biological pest control and other ecosystem services.

International audience; A second nutrition transition seems to be emerging towards more plant-based diets, curbing meat consumption in developed countries at the beginning of the 21st century. This shift suggests that rational arguments tend to influence an increasing number of individuals to adopt vegetarian diets. This paper aims to understand and simulate the impact of different types of messages on the choice to change food diets at the individual level, and the impact of the diffusion of opinions at the collective level. It provides two results: (1) a network of arguments around vegetarian diets is modeled using an abstract argumentation approach. Each argument, formalized by a node, is connected with other arguments by arrows, thus formalizing relationships between arguments. This methodology makes it possible to formalize an argument network about vegetarian diets and to identify the importance of health arguments compared to ethical or other types of arguments. This methodology also identifies key arguments as a result of their high centrality in being challenged or challenging other arguments. The results of this argument network construction suggest that any controversy surrounding vegetarian diets will be polarized around such high centrality arguments about health. Even though few ethical arguments appear in our network, the health arguments concerning the necessity or not of animal products for humans are indirectly connected with ethical 2 choices towards vegetarian diets; (2) an agent-based simulation of the social diffusion of opinions and practices concerning meat consumption is then introduced. The purpose of this simulation is to capture the balance of vegetarian vs. meat food diets. It contributes to modeling consumer choices by exploring the balance between individual values and external influences such as social pressure, communication campaigns and sanitary, environmental or ethical crises.

The concept of agroecological transition revives debates on how to deal with complexity and uncertainty. While the adaptive approach and its “adjust along the way” principle have been adopted as a relevant general framework to deal with partially irreducible uncertainty, the different approaches to the definition and management of uncertainty are rarely explicitated. In this chapter we highlight the diversity of these stances through brief presentations of research work that is related to agroecology and sustainable development, and anchored in various disciplines (modelling, management sciences, economics, ecology). This gives us a first glimpse of the variety of concepts used to describe uncertainty, characterising nature and the different approaches to manage it. It shows also that these definitions of uncertainties, clearly derived from particular disciplines or school of thought, can be applied together in a more or less complementary way. Finally, we discuss how this explicitation of the diversity of approaches to uncertainty contributes to highlighting different ways of defining the agroecological transition itself – especially between determinist or more open-ended approaches–, and identifies interdisciplinary research issues., Agroecological Transitions: From Theory to Practice in Local Participatory Design, ISBN:978-3-030-01952-5, ISBN:978-3-030-01953-2