The Knowledge Communities

The Knowledge Communities (CoSav, from Communautés de Savoirs in French) are both an internal cement for the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD), and a support point for federating and innovative activities. These communities provide a framework for collaboration conducive to the emergence and co-construction of multi-stakeholder projects.

By pursuing a transdisciplinary approach, and with the achievement of the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) as a benchmark, the knowledge communities aim to facilitate the response to concrete opportunities such as setting up projects, preparing syntheses, investing in new collaborative tools, responding to institutional requests and international organisations, and making sustainability science and its methods more visible and accessible.

The IRD has nine knowledge communities.

Biodiversity

Biodiversity refers to all living things and the ecosystems in which they live – from bacteria to plants and animals. This term also includes the interactions of species with each other and with their environments.

Biodiversity is threatened directly and indirectly by human activities (changes in land use, direct exploitation of species and ecosystems, pollution, etc.), while humans depend on it in material (for example, by providing our food and contributing to climate regulation) and immaterial (cultural, aesthetic, etc.) terms.

This interdependence is particularly important in the countries of the Global South, where the conservation of biodiversity and the improvement of the living conditions of their inhabitants must be carried out in a coordinated manner, taking into account the often far-reaching consequences of climate change.

Providing solutions to these challenges, as some of the Sustainable Development Goals aim to do, requires research that brings together all components of society: researchers from all relevant disciplines, decision-makers, donors, civil society and the populations.

The objective of CoSav Biodiversity is to structure a community of researchers to think about and predict future dynamics via inter- and transdisciplinary approaches linking natural sciences to human and social sciences. It thus aims to offer its expertise to the academic and international decision-making sphere on issues related to biodiversity (IPBES, IUCN, CBD, etc.).

Climate

The consequences of global warming are already being felt in many parts of the world and it is likely that even if it is kept below 1.5°C, global warming will threaten certain regions, species and activities. In this context, interdisciplinary and intersectoral approaches are necessary to understand and anticipate the consequences in terms of the evolution of climatic hazards and impacts, to analyze the new risks and vulnerabilities and to co-construct sustainable solutions to limit the impacts in the South.

The objective of the Climate Knowledge Community is to create cross-disciplinary links between mixed research units (UMR) involving the IRD and its partners on issues related to global warming. This interdisciplinary cross-disciplinary initiative is structured around four actions:

• low-carbon research in the South;
• the co-production of knowledge and solutions at the territorial level;
• the development of a digital platform for climate services;
• participation in the science-policy dialogue.

Georesources and sustainability

Extractive activities are a source of disruption for society and the environment and are therefore not very compatible with the concept of sustainability. The Georessources and sustainability (GéoD) Knowledge Community explores the various facets of this antagonism at different scales of space and time, in a global context of global warming, ecological and energy crisis and social and territorial inequalities.

The scope of GéoD covers georesources from their genesis and geological context to their integration into socio-technical assemblages, modes of governance and heterogeneous extractive territories. It also includes the analysis of disturbances induced in the biogeochemical cycles of contaminants in the environment, as well as the health risks and social vulnerabilities generated by associated extractive and industrial activities. This community is a forum for dialogue open to all scientific disciplines, and aims to foster the emergence of new scientific frontiers and original solutions for the avoidance, mitigation and/or repair of damage caused by the exploitation of geological resources.

GeoD contributes to the co-construction of a fairer and more sustainable relationship with georesources and the regions that are home to them, driven by an ethic of responsibility and a reflexive approach. The concepts of justice and responsibility – environmental, health, social, economic – are at the heart of the debates, within the framework of an inclusive science-society-politics dialogue and citizen/participatory research in both the Global North and the Global South.

Coastline and ocean

In the context of global changes, knowledge relating to oceanic and coastal areas is becoming a top priority, as demonstrated by the launch of the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-2030). Ocean and coastal ecosystems provide various services:

• supply by providing a high level of essential foodstuffs;
• regulation and protection against hazards (carbon sequestration);
• support (life and element cycles);
• cultural (levers of attractiveness for seaside tourism and a strong heritage dimension).

However, economic and demographic growth, coastal development and climate change are generating increasing pressures on these ecosystems. These pressures are aggravating the services provided by these oceanic and littoral ecosystems, thus demonstrating the interdependence of societies, coasts and oceans.

Understanding the complexity of the interactions between these environments and humans, who have multiple representations and uses of them, requires the mobilization of a broad spectrum of tools, disciplines and actors. Inter- and transdisciplinary collaborative approaches are essential for the study of the coast-ocean complex as a socio-ecosystem and for the construction of strategies guaranteeing the sustainability of its uses.

The objective of the CoSav LeO is to help bring together, unite and promote a close-knit and visible community of IRD actors and partners in the Global South and Overseas Territories around these issues.

Migrations

In 2021, there were 281 million international migrants in the world, i.e. people living in a country other than the one in which they were born. This ever-increasing international migration is mainly between countries in the Global South, with intra-regional migration being the most common. In addition to this migration between countries, there is also intra-national mobility, which is much more difficult to quantify.

More than the increase in flows, it is the diversification of migratory currents and migrant profiles that constitute the most remarkable changes today. These changes in mobility regimes are part of processes with potentially contradictory effects: tightening of migration policies, modernization of transport and processes of individualization in a context of accelerated economic and cultural globalization.  Goods, products, ideas and standards also circulate with human beings, and it is all these circulations that must be understood.

A major challenge today is to understand the causes and consequences of this mobility and migration at the international and national level, in their various dimensions (temporal, familial, professional, relational, etc.) and taking into account the plurality of dynamics to which they are linked (demographic, economic, social, cultural, etc.).

The objective of the Migrations knowledge community is to study these migrations in their complexity and in their interrelations with environmental issues or with health, by mobilizing together the human and social sciences, the environmental sciences and the biomedical sciences.

The issue of migration is eminently political and potentially controversial. Through its multidisciplinary approach and its roots in different countries, IRD research aims to form a knowledge platform that, together with our partner researchers, will fuel debate, deconstruct preconceived ideas and strengthen the analytical capacities of NGOs, journalists, politicians, teachers and the men and women who migrate.

OneHealth

The COVID-19 crisis has shown the enormous impact that epidemics can have on our societies. Above all, this pandemic has shown that an integrative approach is absolutely necessary to improve our ability to prevent and combat them. Finally, this approach is particularly important in the countries of the Global South, which are on the front line of these emerging diseases.

The One Health CoSav aims to structure the research, visibility and operationalization of the IRD on this topic through major themes, including in particular:

• preventing the emergence of zoonoses, by characterizing these emergence factors (global and societal changes) and by imagining how it is possible to reduce them;
• conducting interventional research, by being at the forefront of these outbreaks by participating in the epidemiological response as well as in the investigation into the origin of the outbreak.

Land and Soil

Soil and earth are major components of terrestrial ecosystems. Global and societal changes contribute to the degradation of these two essential resources and weaken:

• their functioning;
• their resilience;
• the services they provide to human societies.

In general, this degradation of land and soil affects 40% of the world’s population (IPBES, 2018) and leads to major social pressures (migration, large-scale land grabbing, privatization, etc.).

The IRD and its partners have a rich and varied community of expertise on the subject of soil and its uses. Combining knowledge on this subject, which is transdisciplinary by nature, is a major societal challenge. This is what the Land and Soil knowledge community is proposing by contributing to the pooling and cross-appropriation of all this knowledge. Its work revolves around the issues of construction and dissemination of interdisciplinary scientific knowledge at different interfaces: biotic/abiotic, soil/plant, water/soil, ecosystems/societies, science/society and at different spatial and temporal scales.  This whole approach encourages the emergence of multidisciplinary science fronts and the promotion of Science-Society and North-South dialog.

Sustainable Food System

Transforming food systems to make them more sustainable and resilient is a priority promoted by many institutions to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. This requires a commitment from everyone and disruptive actions. Research on food systems is relatively recent. It requires the use of resolutely interdisciplinary skills and approaches. With its diverse expertise and rich partnerships, the IRD is able to co-develop solution-oriented research to address the sustainability challenges of food systems in the Global South.
Thus, the major challenges of the Sustainable Food Systems knowledge community are to:

• unite a research community within the IRD and its partners;
• produce actionable knowledge on this topic.

Sustainable cities

Urban areas in the Global South are undergoing profound changes, which are amplified in particular by:

• the combination of rapid urban growth;
• social transformations;
• globalization and global change.

These changes pose numerous challenges in terms of sustainability, equality, justice, security, health, inclusion, etc.

The Sustainable Cities knowledge community aims to promote research into the creation of sustainable cities by:

• analyzing urban systems in all their complexity;
• taking into account the diversity of situations in the Global South.

And this through two main thematic approaches:

• sustainability of living conditions in urban areas;
• interrelations between urban systems and rural systems and traffic flows.

The Sustainable Cities CoSav also aims to deepen the reflection on methods facilitating interdisciplinarity, in particular based on:

• questions on the observation and analysis of data (e.g. big data vs. ethnography, night lighting data vs. land transformation data, etc.);
• urban trajectories at different temporal and spatial scales;
• low-cost/low-tech participatory mechanisms, etc.