CHOICES4

Land use change is responsible for about 10% of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. Tropical forest ecosystems can participate in both pillars of addressing global warming, namely mitigation and adaptation:

-Tropical forests and plantations are important potential carbon sinks, their biomass can provide energy to replace fossil fuels, while reducing deforestation and forest degradation and improving forest management (REDD+) can significantly reduce anthropogenic GHG emissions

-The ability of human societies, which are still essentially rural, to adapt to climate change depends in part on the state of available natural resources, while the necessary adaptation of tropical ecosystems to climate change can be facilitated by human interventions.

In the context of the implementation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, mechanisms such as the Sustainable Development Mechanism (SDM) and REDD+, and voluntary markets, as well as ecosystem-based adaptation to climate change, provide a new opportunity for tropical forestry, as well as a potential lever for tropical forest protection or restoration. The module provides an understanding of the basic concepts of climate change, the role of tropical ecosystems in the global carbon cycle, and the technical, policy and economic responses to climate change issues.

Module Content:

This module provides basic knowledge on topics such as the carbon cycle, the mechanisms and consequences of climate change, and the technical and policy frameworks for mitigation and adaptation to climate change. The potential of tropical agro-ecosystems is assessed based on scientific studies and existing operational projects.

Teaching and Learning Methods:

-Course (18 hours)

-TD (3 hours).

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This course proposes notions of plant architecture and development of the whole plant (stem and root) in the context of a diagnosis of the state of trees and their functioning in view of a management adapted to the objectives. The consideration and management of trees meet different criteria depending on the contexts considered (forest, fruit trees or urban). The following topics will be addressed in a theoretical and practical manner with case studies. (1) Generalities on morphology and architecture of the whole plant, (2) Life trajectories of the tree, forms of expectation (3) Trauma (competition, pruning, bio-aggressors) and reactivity of architectures (4) Practical work on the diagnosis of forest, fruit and urban trees

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The goals of this course are to deepen the key concepts related to climate change, to illustrate important concepts in ecology and evolution in the light of climate change, in many different ecosystems, and to synthesize the different scientific and societal questions and issues raised by CC.

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"Businesses play a central role today in the dynamics of ecosystem degradation, and as such are increasingly called upon to contribute to their protection. How then can we improve the consideration of biodiversity issues by companies, and the involvement of companies in the territorial management of ecosystems? Moreover, if conservation sciences and ecology propose a growing number of indicators and data to evaluate biodiversity in its multiple forms, how can this information be structured so that it can be used for strategic and collective action and dialogue between stakeholders?

An ecological accounting approach as a management science discipline allows us to address these issues of structuring ecological indicators and information systems, the responsibilities of the various actors who interact with ecosystems, and the associated forms of accountability.

The field of ecological accounting and its recent developments on biodiversity aim to transform the accounting systems traditionally used by firms in order to better take into account the value of natural capital (biodiversity, ecosystems), and thus anchor it at the heart of management processes at different levels of corporate management. Innovation in ecological accounting also exists on other perimeters (national, at the scale of ecosystems) and can thus make it possible to create articulations at different scales of ecosystem governance.

The interactive lectures are punctuated by exercises of varying length that put the students in an active position:

- reading and facilitated discussion of scientific articles in the field;

- game for comparative analysis of natural capital accounting tools and models, etc.

-A case study of the mobilization of ecosystem accounting approaches

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