Modelling for sustainable adaptation planning
Prof. Alexis Drogoul. UMMISCO/ IRD-France.
Summary: The use of GIS and
spatial information has become essential in planning the adaptation of human
communities to the impacts of climate change and disasters, especially in
developing countries where other alternative infrastructures do not always
exist. Reducing the vulnerability of communities to these impacts, while
increasing their resilience through a sustainable path to development,
requires however more advanced tools, like dynamic integrated models of
socio-ecosystems, able to capture and represent the complex interactions
and feedback loops between a changing society and its changing environment in
multiple climatic scenarios.
The design of such models
raises different challenges, among which :
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- the necessity to support
multidisciplinary contributions as their scope expands beyond
climate-related issues and spatial information to embrace social, economical or
ecological ones;
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- the necessity to offer ways to
represent (and explore) the complexity of the socio-ecological processes that
need to adapt or be adapted;
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- the necessity to support
stakeholders to participate in the design and assessment of alternate
adaptation strategies. |
It is argued in this speech
that agent-based modeling (ABM) can provide a capable framework for addressing
these challenges. Current research perspectives, illustrated by
examples taken from the work of IRD modellers with Vietnamese
partners, will be presented, with the main aim of opening a
fruitful discussion with the audience about the role of models in
Sustainability Science.
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Bio: Alexis Drogoul graduated in AI
in 1990 and received his PhD. degree from the University of Paris 6 in 1993. Recruited
in 1995 as associate professor, he became full professor in 2000 and joined the
IRD as a senior researcher in 2004. He works on agent-based simulation of
complex systems, mainly by developing the GAMA platform (http://gama-platform.org). Since 2007, he has been working in Vietnam to enhance the
research capacity of Vietnamese teams (IFI-MSI, CTU-DREAM, USTH-ICTLab,
TLU-WARM) on the design of models for environmental decision-support and
adaptation to climate change, in the framework of several international
research projects. In addition, he is since 2017 the representative
of IRD in Vietnam and Philippines.
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