Editorial

The doctoral training on Otober 21 and 22, 2025 at INRAE in Paris and in Visio

On January 21, INRAE and the FAO organized a scientific seminar on foresight applications to the transition of agrifood systems. INRAE, a French research organization, and the FAO, a specialized agency of the United Nations, both work in the field of agriculture and food. Both organizations use foresight as a tool to inform public policy, and share methodological issues such as change of scale. The FAO carries out foresight exercises to identify how to transform agrifood systems from the regional to the global level. Similarly, INRAE has already carried out foresight work on several scales : Nouvelles ruralités 2030, Elévation du niveau de la mer en 2100, Forêt des Landes de Gascogne 2050. The seminar took place against the backdrop of the challenges faced by countries around the world in transforming agrifood systems towards sustainability and resilience.

Wednesday, April 30, 2025 from 9:00 am to 1:00 pm - Grand amphithéâtre MGEN, 3 square Max-Hymans 75015 Paris

Soil performs functions that are essential to terrestrial ecosystems, food security and health. There is a lack of indicators to support public policies concerned with the proper functioning and protection of soils. The study provides a corpus of documented and shared information for assessing soil quality. Around fifty indicators have been selected by the study's authors to monitor soil quality and health. They relate to a soil function or a type of degradation, and are associated with an interpretation reference system that specifies the measurement or calculation method used and the reference values to which the result must be compared. The indication system also incorporates a series of choices that are largely up to the users of the assessment. It calls into question the purpose of the evaluation, which needs to be clarified in order to select the indicators and choose the interpretation reference system, the monitoring grid and whether or not to aggregate different indicators to make the evaluation more readable.

A position for a permanent foresight research engineer with a background in political science will soon be opening up for external competition within INRAE's Department of Collective Scientific Assessment, Foresight and Studies (DEPE) https://depe.hub.inrae.fr/

The European project Future innovation for pesticide use reduction in agriculture (FORTUNA, 01/2024 - 12/2027) brings together a consortium of 11 organizations from European Union countries (universities, research institutes and technical institutes) coordinated by the Julius Kuhn Institute.

Wednesday, November 20th, 2024: from 1:30 to 5:45 pm - Auditorium du FIAP, 30 rue Cabanis, 75014 Paris.

A "Training and Workshop: Scientific Information in a collective scientific assessment", led by Virginie Lelievre (DEPE-AgroEcosystem), Agnès Girard (PHASE) and Anne Laure Achard (AQUA), INRAE documentalists, took place from March 4 to 7, 2024, at the Royal University of Agriculture, Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

The week of april 22th to 26th, 2024, INRAE's Directorate for Collective Scientific Assessment, Foresight and Studies, and IRD's Mission on Expertise and Consultancy have been invited to take part in a number of meetings in Washington and New York to talk about expertise and foresight.

Environmental impacts and technical, economic and social issues associated with mobilizing agricultural and forest biomass for energy production in France to 2050.