Etude des compromis et synergies entre services écosystémiques et biodiversité : Une approche multidimensionnelle de leurs interactions dans le socioécosystème des Alpes Française

摘要

In the context of global climate change and local land use changes, the future of the French Alps cultural landscapes, shaped through long-lasting and mutual interactions between human and their environment, appears uncertain. Simultaneously, the ecosystems constituting alpine landscapes host a rich biodiversity and provide the many natural resources and ecological functions that benefit to human societies. These resources and functions are conceptualised as “ecosystem services” and currently attract an increasing attention for the management and the conservation of environmental resources, along with biodiversity. Identifying the variables linked to their maintenance, in ecological, socio-cultural and political terms, is a necessary step of their sustainable management, and yet is still under-explored. My PhD project aimed at increasing the understanding of positive (synergies) and negative (trade-offs) interactions among ecosystem services and biodiversity through a multi-dimensional approach of the French Alps social-ecological system. - In Chapter I, I present a quantitative and spatially explicit biophysical assessment of ecosystem multifunctionality. After a modelling step, we explored spatial patterns of trade-offs and synergies among ecosystem services and biodiversity using a series of statistical analyses of increasing complexity. Results were structured to provide insights for sound environmental governance at multiple scales. We identified various bundles of ecosystem services representative of the different conditions across the French Alps massif in terms of biogeography, management and landscape heterogeneity. - This approach is complemented in Chapter II by a qualitative representation of influence relationships among ecosystem services and biodiversity that also accounts for additional ecological and social variables. We explicitly considered the multiple dimensions encompassed by the ecosystem service concept (their ‘facets') and proposed an innovative conceptual framework to represent their influence networks. This framework was applied to analyse a consultative process that we carried out with stakeholders of regional expertise. This analysis highlighted their general perception of important influence relationships in the alpine social ecological system. - In order to better understand social regulations linked to environmental governance, we test in Chapter III a methodology for assessing the environmental effectiveness of policy instruments. We concentrated on a restricted set of instruments regulating the interactions between biodiversity, agriculture and outdoor tourism. The consideration of multiple indicators assessing the performance and the fit with the socio-cultural and governance setting highlighted the complex articulation of instruments within the broader policy mix. Results were synthesised in a policy brief targeting regional decision-makers. - Chapter IV is conceived as my personal exploration of the conceptual and ethical issues linked to research on ecosystem services. Following some general thinking on the relations between environmental sciences and society, I conducted a personal reflexive assessment of the research projects I contributed to. To conclude, I propose a synthetic vision of the alpine social-ecological system and discuss the major issues revealed throughout the analyses.