"This Unesco Centre will enable us to take a step forward".
On October 15, the University of Montpellier, the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, andUNESCO signed a six-year agreement for the establishment of an international center dedicated to water. A first in France and a great victory for Eric Servat, Director of theInstitut méditerranéen de l'eau et de l'environnement and initiator of the project. Interview with this key figure in Montpellier's water science community.
The University of Montpellier is to host a UNESCO international center dedicated to water. It's called Icireward. What does this acronym mean?
My colleague and friend Olivier Barreteau, Director of UMR G-EAU, came up with this acronym. It stands for "International center for interdisciplinary research on water system dynamics". In French, it would be translated as "Centre international de recherche interdisciplinaire sur les dynamiques des socio-hydro-systèmes". And it fits in perfectly with who we are and our project.
It's a category 2 Unesco Center. What's the difference with a category 1 center?
In concrete terms, this means that we have more autonomy to define our strategic orientations than a category 1 center. In fact, in the field of water sciences, only the Delft Center in the Netherlands was in category 1, but it too has asked to move to category 2. We will nevertheless have a Unesco representative on our Strategic Orientation Council and, of course, we will produce the expected reports every two years. We are working with Unesco in a climate of shared trust, which will enable us to implement our project with confidence.
How many Unesco water centers are there in the world?
In all, there are around thirty of them, and we're the first in France. The French scientific community, and in particular the Montpellier water sciences community, has been working with Unesco for a very long time, so it made sense to formalize these links.
There's talk of a water community in Montpellier. Are there that many of you?
This Unesco Center brings together fifteen laboratories in Montpellier (in the broadest sense, including Narbonne and Alès). These include large structures 100% dedicated to water sciences, such as HydroSciences, which I headed for 14 years, as well as G-EAU and Lisah at the Institut Agro - Montpellier Supagro. And then there are all the other laboratories where water is part of the activity. All in all, this represents some 400 scientists and almost 150 PhD students. When you're able to mobilize that many people, you've got a significant critical mass which, in the field of water sciences, is the largest structured community in France.
In all disciplines?
At HydroSciences you'll find physicists, modelers and hydrologists, as well as chemists, geochemists and microbiologists. At G-EAU, economists, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists... At Lisah, agronomists, soil scientists... and in the other laboratories, geographers, remote sensing specialists, etc... We cover an extremely broad and diverse spectrum of scientific disciplines.
There's also a long history of water science in Montpellier
Yes, it's our history that means we have all these skills. Back in the days of the USTL, the Université des Sciences et Techniques du Languedoc, there were already mathematical hydrology and hydrogeology laboratories. In the 60s, people like Professor Avias were working on the source of the Lez. Montpellier is home to all the national organizations working in the field of water, including CNRS,IRD,CIRAD, BRGM, INRAE... This history means that, probably more than anywhere else, we have the ability to bring together people with different and highly complementary skills and areas of study.
Is this why Montpellier was chosen to host the Center?
The strength of Montpellier's water science community lies in its ability to be multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary. This is what sets us apart from other sites in France, which do excellent work but lack this specificity. This interdisciplinarity was already the basis of the Mediterranean Institute for Water and the Environment (IM2E), and it is this particularity, which is our main asset, that we have transposed into our project to create a Unesco Center.
And isn't it hard to get all these people to work together?
We worked hard to bring this collective together and coordinate the activities of these teams. An IFR (Institut fédératif de recherche, or federative research institute) laid the foundations for this collective before coming to a halt in 2010. We then completed this work by creating the IM2E on January1, 2015, which provided a gathering place for all these players to define collective strategies. And of course there was the creation of Muse.
What role did Muse play in this?
In a way, the Unesco Center is the fruit of the Muse project. Through Kim Waters, Muse encouraged us to identify actions and projects capable of enhancing our international appeal and visibility. More directly, Muse gave us the financial capacity to set up research projects that typically foreshadowed what the Unesco Centre would become. I'm not sure what we would have achieved without Muse's help. There's this trust, this support that makes us believe in it. And in return, I hope that with this Centre, we'll be able to make our contribution to the Muse project.
What are the main projects you'll be working on now?
When you work with Unesco, you're working with the United Nations, and so the imperative framework is the Sustainable Development Goals.SDG 6 of course, which is 100% dedicated to water and sanitation supply issues, and a number of other SDGs as well. There are over 2 billion people today who have no access to drinking water or reliable sanitation systems, which makes water the number one vector of disease - not the least of paradoxes when we know how essential it is.
And do you have any specific areas of focus?
We have built this research project around five main axes, ranging from the characterization of elementary processes to approaches focused on the functioning of societies. What we call socio-hydro-systems. So, for example, the vulnerability of systems to anthropic pressures, and the availability and quality of water resources in relation to climate change. But also work on social dynamics, the trade-offs to be found between, for example, land use and water resource management policies. We are making the most of the wide range of scientific skills that characterize Montpellier. That's the challenge we've decided to take up, namely to emphasize interdisciplinarity in order to tackle the crucial issues emerging in the water sector in the years ahead.
This agreement is signed for six years and after that?
The Center will remain in existence until October 14, 2026, after which there's no reason why it shouldn't be renewed. The Delft Centre has been in existence for some sixty years.
We imagine that this convention will open many doors for you...
Yes, the international recognition and visibility provided by Unesco is something very powerful which will enable us to take a step forward. Our aim is to play a significant role in the network of Unesco Centers and Chairs, what we call the "Unesco water family". This gives us the capacity to interact with all the other Centers, in Delft in the Netherlands, Lodz in Poland, Dundee in Scotland, the United States and Japan. This openness will strengthen our networks and open up opportunities for student exchanges and scientific visits.
With the South too?
Unesco has a very strong impact in the South, where it helps to structure scientific communities through international programs. We already have highly structured and often long-standing IRD and CIRAD networks, and here again, Unesco is going to offer us facilities to develop these networks. All the more so as several of us are heavily involved in UNESCO's major programs, in particular the Intergovernmental Hydrological Program (IHP).
In terms of training, what will the Center bring?
Training is a very important issue for Unesco. So the idea, as far as we're concerned, is not to create additional training courses, but to promote the Montpellier site's courses of excellence to make them even more attractive than they already are, whether it's the Master Eau,Polytech/STE, Isntitut Agro - MontpellierSupagro, AgroParisTech,École des Mines d'Alès....In particular, by opening them up even more to students from developing countries.
And what about financial support from Unesco?
Unesco's funding capacity is limited, but it's probably easier to get funding as a Unesco Center. It's not the same thing, for example, to go and see the big national and international foundations as "just" the director of IM2E as it is as the director of a large Unesco Centre. For us, this should make a big difference.