Welcome to iGLOBES

Visiting researchers Anne Sourdril and Luc Barbaro made the front page of the Green Valley News on their OHMI project SONATAS – Listening to the SOunds of NATure to understAnd environmental changeS. 

The multidisciplinary research OHMI project aims at grasping (i) how local communities and people perceive their landscapes and ecosystems in a context of strong mutations of societies and their environment; and (ii) how they think about adaptation to environmental changes through their immediate sound environments, or soundscapes. The project is located in Pima County which is confronted with multiple sociological and environmental changes, including climate warming, water scarcity and uncontrolled urbanization. Sonatas aims to understand through sounds experiences and perceptions how the environment is locally conceived by local communities and whether it is seen as changing or immuable. Our objective is to explore how different types of ecological knowledge coexist within those communities in the context of major mutations and how people could collaborate together to face those changes.

Financed by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) with the support of the ANR project led by Sabrina Teyssier, Boris Wieczorek’s doctoral thesis “Changing norms and disparity when confronted with climate change” is looking at how social norms can be used as a mechanism to promote cooperation between individuals in situations where personal and community interests are in conflict, with a specific focus on environments that are threatened by climate change.

Two research laboratories are involved in Boris’ project: Grenoble Applied Economics Laboratory (GAEL, France) and Interdisciplinary Global Environmental Studies (iGLOBES, University of Arizona). After researching behavior changes in controlled environments, the project is now concentrating on water issues in the Tucson region.

The ENERGON research project, funded by the CNRS and INEE through the Labex DRIIHM, is an interdisciplinary and multi-site project, which relies on the network of Human-Environment Observatory (OHM), in place since 2007. Led by the OHM of the Provence Mining Basin, the project’s objective is to question the conditions of energy transitions in 6 different observatories and locations.

If climate change is a major element of global proportio with local repercussions, the resulting injunction on energy transition is done in different manners, depending on the territory. Studies on the local impact of energy transitions are mainly very limited and sectorial in nature. The challenge of this project, at the heart of the OHMs, is to go beyond this barrier, by intersecting social, technical and environmental dimensions specific to each socio-ecosystem. Learn more...

The relationship between societies and their hydrosystems can be understood as a series of connections and disconnections that occur in all domains (e.g., hydrological, geomorphological, ecological, etc.) and dimensions (e.g, longitudinal, vertical, lateral). The use of watercourses and water resources creates material and symbolic connections which leads water stakeholders to also consider the sociological and political, aesthetic and spiritual dimensions of the socio-hydrosystem. However, the development of physical (e.g, dams) and social  infrastructures (e.g, waterbodies are so artificialized that local residents forget about their existence) generates important disconnections. As a result, recent water and environmental policies emphasize the importance of connectivity between the various elements and compartments of socio-hydro-systems and focus especially on reconnection at all levels. Learn more...

Regis Ferriere, Director of iGLOBES,  Boris Sauterey, Benjamin Charnay, Antonin Affholder and Stephane Mazeret just published an article in Nature Astronomy, "Early Mars habitability and global cooling by H2-based methanogens" :

"We find that subsurface habitability was very likely, and limited mainly by the extent of surface ice coverage. Biomass productivity could have been as high as in the early Earth’s ocean. However, the predicted atmospheric composition shift caused by methanogenesis would have triggered a global cooling event, ending potential early warm conditions, compromising surface habitability and forcing the biosphere deep into the Martian crust..." 

Daniel Stolte  of University Communications wrote an article in UA News under the title "Life may have thrived on early Mars, until it drove climate change that caused its demise".

Based on an ethnographic analysis of childfree communities, and on the lexographical processing of Internet posts, this paper analyses the evolution of speech about childlessness in the English-speaking world. Over the past dozen years, environmental fears have progressively emerged as a main concern among the Internet pages and groups that we studied. While childfree communities have been long divided between those who lament their infertility and those who defend a life without children, new “antinatalist” discourses have emerged that place population reduction as a legitimate political aim and/or a valid ethical proposition. Childfree life, seen as neither a curse nor an opportunity, tends to be more frequently associated with an altruistic decision in the face of impending ecological disasters. By describing these discourses, and retracing their evolution and distribution, this paper studies the emergence of new ethical concerns that defend childfree lives as an ecological choice and a new approach to population growth.