Referent
Esencia project background
Local authorities and forest users in the Centre Val de Loire region (France) and Rio Negro province (Argentina) are concerned about the state of their forests and their response to climate change. The decline of these forests raises questions about their future, and about human intervention to mitigate the adverse impacts of climate change and maintain the ecosystem services, both market and non-market, provided by these forests.
The two territories, both heavily wooded, don’t have the same forests and have different policies, histories and cultures. In both areas, a sense of urgency is driving scientists and forest users to organize themselves to develop solutions for adapting to climate change, based on the most relevant and recent scientific knowledge, and on the experience and technical and local knowledge of those working in the field, while taking into account the diversity of the issues at stake.
These territories are home to research laboratories specializing in forest ecosystem sciences (INRAE BIOFORA URZF, GBFOR in Orléans and EFNO in Nogent-sur-Vernisson in France, and INTA, IFAB (INTA – CONICET) and UNRN (Universidad Nacional de Río Negro) – among others – in Bariloche, Argentina). INRAE and INTA have been working closely together since 2004. In 2018, the two institutes set up the International Associated Laboratory (LIA) FORESTIA, which was joined in 2020 by UNAH (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Huanta, Peru) and at the end of 2022 by the Colegio de Postgraduados de Texcoco (Mexico). Through the LIA, they are studying the adaptation of forests to environmental changes, and in particular to climate change.
The Esencia project and its objectives
The 2023-2024 “Latin America and Caribbean” call for projects issued by the MEAE (French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs) provided the opportunity to build a bilateral France-Argentina collaboration project based on the LIA FORESTIA and in line with the Sycomore program’s strategy of partnership dynamics. The overall objective is to launch pilot bilateral collaborative actions between the Centre Val de Loire region and the Orleans metropolis in France on the one hand, and the province of Rio Negro in Argentina, on the other. The aim is to co-construct and share new tools to help forests in both regions better adapt to new climatic conditions.
The Esencia project has three main focuses
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- Towards participatory decision-making applied to public environmental and forestry policies.
- What are forests saying? Production of data on the response of forests to climate change and on the representations of these responses.
- The message from the forests: raising awareness among stakeholders and the general public of the effects of climate change on forests.
More precisely, the objectives of this project are to :
- Carry out pilot actions to improve our ability to observe the response of forests to climate change.
- Enhance the value of these observations for the benefit of local authorities, professionals and players in the forestry-wood industry and society, in an exemplary way that can be used in other areas.
- Collect more relevant and up-to-date data, and make it available to research laboratories and forest users more quickly. By “making the forests talk”, i.e. by translating forest reactions into a form that is accessible, understandable, interpretable and usable, we can raise awareness among stakeholders and the general public, and inform the decision-making of stakeholders.
- Organize consultation and experimentation to improve our ability to propose collective and consensual adaptation solutions.
Some of the actions originally conceived as part of ARD Sycomore will be integrated into the Esencia project, resulting in an Argentinean and a French version.
- As part of the GenForFutur project, a survey is to be carried out among forest professionals and users on how they perceive the impact of climate change on forests, and how they are taking it into account. At the same time, another survey will be carried out among the general public, to understand their perception of the forest and their views on the use of wood, the climate threat and silvicultural practices. These surveys will be carried out in partnership, and both versions of the survey will be adapted to local contexts (languages and natural environments) while remaining as close as possible to each other for comparability.
- Within the framework of scientific mediation, an educational kit will be developed and implemented collaboratively, for subsequent distribution in France and Argentina.
