Project

The global environmental crisis shows that human societies are not external to the environment, although they occupy a special place within it. The complexity of the processes linking human systems and natural ecosystems is the key to understanding the notion of the Anthropocene, which, while signaling the entry into a critical era of systemic disruption, emphasizes that social systems have never been autonomous. The TASAB project is studying the dynamics of interactions between society and the environment, using the example of the semi-arid Nordeste region of Brazil, a vast area with a long history of anthropization, where demographic changes and urbanization in recent decades have transformed social and territorial dynamics.

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The global crisis is both a social and an environmental systems crisis. To initiate the ecological transition and understanding the mechanisms of the crisis requires the construction of an interdisciplinary research framework. It is also key to integrate different scales of time and space to understand the dynamics of the environment, both in terms of changes in the mutual relations between society and the environment, and by defining a pre-anthropic reference framework capable of identifying the anthropogenic part of the global disturbances. To link disciplines and time scales, we opt for the observation of soils, which are climate-vegetation interfaces and play a central role in biogeochemical cycles (carbon in particular), while being at the heart of essential human activities. Finally, building the analysis from a spatial, and specifically territorial, approach makes it possible to link the regional and local scales in the study, and to deal with the global crisis, not according to a sectoral economic approach or as a function of specific hazards, but by placing it in the broad dynamic of social organization. We associate this dynamic with the demographic transition and its many effects which are geographical (population redistribution, urbanization) and socio-demographic (individual and collective).

This allows to place the global crisis in the combination of two nexuses, biodiversity/climate/resources and society/food/resources, and to trace a continuum between individual practices, social and territorial organizations on one hand, and society-environment interactions on the other hand. We hope that this approach will lead to the definition of socio-environmental thresholds that are useful for the ecological transition definition.

Our study is situated in the semi-arid region of Brazil, a vast and densely populated region where socio-environmental tensions are exacerbated by unequal social structures, strong demographic growth and climate change.

a) Le semi-aride brésilien (et le Nordeste). Indice de développement humain municipal (2010) et population (2017), selon l’IBGE-UNPD.

b) Indice de vulnérabilité à la dégradation/désertification dans le Nordeste.