UM atUM [S01-ep19]: From Ecological Compensation to the BricoLab at the Institut Agro

[Podcast] - Published on April 14, 2022 in Science and Society

This week on "UM at theUM ," Sébastien Desbureaux, an economist at the CEE-M, talks to us about ecological compensation at the Ambatovy mine in Madagascar. In the second half of the show, Amrin returns for his startup segment. Finally, our feature segment takes us to the BricoLab at the Institut Agro with Guilhem Brunel.

“Avoid – Reduce – Offset.” This motto, known in the jargon as the ERC sequence, may not mean much to you, yet it has been at the heart of French environmental policy since July 1976 and the Nature Protection Act. Its goal? To encourage major developers to avoid or reduce the negative impact of infrastructure and its operation on the environment and, when that is not possible, to offset any residual impacts that could not be avoided.

A significant step forward on paper, though its impact on the ground remains very limited due to the lack of clarity surrounding these rules. It wasn’t until 2012 that the Ministry of Ecology, Sustainable Development, and Energy clarified its rules, drawing in particular on the findings of a working group created in 2010 that brought together representatives from NGOs, project owners, and engineering firms. At the heart of these issues: better implementation of the principle, of course, but also better oversight of its application.

And monitoring inevitably involves assessment. How, indeed, can we ensure that compensation will be fair, commensurate with the damage caused, effective in both space and time, and capable of ensuring “no net loss of biodiversity”?

And in the end, isn’t compensation already a form of loss? Isn’t it allowing the most powerful developers to destroy nature under the pretext that they might pay for it? In 2019, a French multidisciplinary team led, among others, by theNational Museum of Natural History(MNHN) concluded, after analyzing 24infrastructureprojects authorized by the government, that for 80% of them, the environmental compensation measures were either not stringent enough or inappropriate.

And what about the rest of the world? Scientists from Bangor University in the United Kingdom and the Montpellier Center for Environmental Economics (CEE-M) examined the case of theAmbatovy mining site in Madagascar, which presents itself as a leader in sustainable mining. Their independent study, published in March 2022 in *Nature Sustainability*, suggests—with some caveats—that this strategy may have saved as much forest as was lost at the mining site.

This is good news, which we’ll explore in detail and discuss with Sébastien Desbureaux of the CEE-M, who participated in this study as an economics researcher.

Finally, the documentary segment will take us straight to the Institut Agro, where a brand-new facility— the AgroFabLab—has just been inaugurated. This is a laboratory unlike any other, consisting of three spaces: the MiamLab, the BioLab, and the BricoLab. Guilhem Brunel introduces us to this space for hands-on creation focused on digital agriculture and the environment.

AtUM , you’ve got the schedule—let’s get started!

Production: Universityof Montpellier/Divergence FM
Host: Lucie Lecherbonnier
Interview: AlinePériault/Lucie Lecherbonnier
Reporting and editing: AlinePériault
Directed by: AdelineFloch’/Anna Demeulandre

Tune in to the show “A LUM LA SCIENCE” on Divergence FM 93.9