Land uses disrupt the natural functioning of soils, leading to degradation of soil resources. At the same time, forecasts estimate that agricultural production has to be increased by 1.85-fold to meet the food demand of 9 billion people by 2050. Agro-ecological practices thus have to fulfil two main objectives simultaneously—minimize soil degradation while improving ecosystem services. Agro-ecological strategies for restoring soil functioning mainly strive to enhance the soil organic matter pool by increasing organic matter input fluxes. We argue that future agro-ecological techniques should also be geared towards increasing the residence time of organic matter in soil. This would represent a win-win strategy since long-term C storage in soils is also an issue in terms of climate change. This has been highlighted recently by the French Minister of Agriculture when proclaiming the future launch of the "4 per 1000" project at COP21. A better understanding of the mechanisms that control organic matter stabilisation in soils is therefore needed. Mineral surfaces are suspected to play a major role in C storage in soils and the “nanoSoilC” project focuses specifically on the study of OM stabilization by organo-mineral interactions. We propose a conceptual breakthrough of organo-mineral interactions: our model no longer consider mineral surfaces as stable, but instead, subject to weathering. Weathering generates nanometric amorphous Al Si and Fe polymers with large specific surface areas and high reactivity towards organic compounds that they may stabilize on long-term timescales (Basile-Doelsch et al. 2015). The overall objective of the project is to explain the process of soil organic matter stabilization and destabilization by describing the mechanisms that control the organo-mineral interactions at the nano-scale. Organo-mineral complexes, considered at nanoscale, are called nCOMx. We focus on mechanisms of nCOMx formation (during phases of soil formation and steady-state), and on mechanisms of nCOMx destabilization (loss of soil OM during the transition from forest to cultivated soil). These different mechanisms are addressed by complementary approaches. The project is organized in five Work Packages. nCOMx formation is addressed by experimental laboratory approaches (WP1) and field experiments (WP4). nCOMx destabilization is addressed by both laboratory (WP1) and field experiments (WP3), but also by an innovative modelling approach (WP2). WP0 is dedicated to the coordination of the project between partners. The consortium brings together four partners (CEREGE, ECOSYS, BEF and Recyclage& Risques) representing 5 French institutes (CNRS, Aix-Marseille Université, Collège de France, INRA and CIRAD). The panel of scientists provides expertise in various disciplines. It aims to bring together the science of nanoparticles (and their characterization tools) with soil science. The overall budget requested to ANR is 690000 euros and includes training of post-doctoral fellows, PhD, and Master’s students. Outputs toward scientific communities and popularization of soil OM issues are also proposed. Beyond the basic knowledge on soil functioning, two main outputs of this project are expected: (1) providing a hierarchy of processes controlling the C residence time to improve our capacity to understand and model long-term ecosystem services provided by organic matter in soils; and (2) providing the basis for understanding agro-ecological practices with respect to C storage and proposing innovation items. The Soils-nCOMx research project will thus be an innovative input for restoring the OM pool in cultivated soils to address two major societal issues: food security and climate change mitigation.

In a context of climate change, assessing the evolution of the risk associated with the contamination of wheat with mycotoxins produced by fungal species belonging to the genus Fusarium is crucial to ensure the safety of future cereal-derived food products in France. EvolTox proposes to tackle this challenge and deliver the basal knowledge and its integration in models simulating the occurrence of fusariotoxins in wheat harvests in relation to various climatic contexts. EvolTox implements a two-scale approach, combining field survey and laboratory studies to feed models. First, the representativeness of the Fusarium species/toxins over a 15-years-period will be investigated in the light of climatic and/or agronomic factors to precise the drivers that shape their distribution . Second, EvolTox proposes to associate ecophysiological and interspecies competition studies with an evolutionary biology approach to increase the accuracy and completeness of the predictive models.

Air conditioning (AC) has emerged in the 1950s United States as an effective way to cope with heat stress. It has since then massively spread across North America, Japan and urban China, but very little in the developing world. Despite providing important benefits, it generates greenhouse gas emissions by using electricity and leaking hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), thereby adding a dangerous positive feedback loop into the climate system. Moreover, it is suspected to have adverse effects on health (by decreasing physical activity) and diverting resources away from traditional heat-proof habitat. The global expansion of AC is expected to take a new, dramatic turn with the combination of global warming, income rise and urbanization. This confluence of factors is expected to be most critical in African countries, were AC ownership rates are currently below 1%. Despite the importance of the challenge, AC is virtually unstudied in African contexts. There is thus an urgent need to fill this gap and provide policy recommendations for sustainable cooling in Africa. The AFRICOOLING project is committed to seizing this timely research opportunity. To do so, it will take an integrated demand- supply-policy approach to cooling and explore blind spots in it in three inter-related work packages (WP). On the demand side, research into the adoption of cooling technologies has focused on temperature and income as the main determinants. A broader set of factors needs to be investigated, including health, behaviors, attitudes, new electricity pricing schemes, and, crucially, dynamic effects such as heat waves. To address this gap, WP1 will consist in conducting comprehensive household surveys (N=400 in each) in Mombasa and Mwingi in Kenya and Abidjan in Côte d'Ivoire. The same households will be surveyed every year so as to build a 4-year dataset fit for capturing a broad range of effects. The team will benefit from field support from the University of Nairobi, Institut Polytechnique Houphouët-Boigny (INP-HB) and Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD). On the supply side, research has focused on long-term price and efficiency adjustments in AC retail in the United States. In an attempt to generate broader insights, the coordinator has started assembling a high-frequency database of cooling products in 13 African countries in June 2019. E-commerce data are collected for 13,000 cooling products (AC, fans, refrigerators) and a control group of other products (smartphone, rice, etc.) on a daily basis. In WP2, this work will be continued so as to provide 6 years of data by the end of the project. In addition, on-site visits will be conducted in Kenyan and Ivorian retail stores and at street corner merchants to complement the online data with offline ones. On the policy side, research has documented very few conventional policies such as energy efficiency labels for AC across Africa. Meanwhile, non-conventional policies such as import bans on second- hand appliances have been documented in Ghana. Yet more policies are supposed to be adopted under the international framework of the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, imposing HFC phase-downs. In WP3, a more systematic analysis of African cooling policies will be conducted and complemented with interviews with stakeholders in the Kigali Amendment to identify the key factors of policy effectiveness at both the global and domestic levels. The results from the different WPs will be integrated into a final WP generating contrasted cooling pathways and making policy recommendations for promoting the more sustainable ones. The project will gather an interdisciplinary team of 11 highly qualified experts from the coordinator's close circle and beyond, and allow him to hire a PhD student and a three-year postdoc. Following the highest ethics standards, it will produce extensive, novel and highly valuable datasets that will be made broadly accessible.

Ever-increasing waste production has prompted the need for new provisions regarding waste management to ensure sustainable development. There is now a global consensus among scientists, economists, politicians and civil society stakeholders on the necessity to recycle resources and close loops in a circular economy. Agricultural recycling makes it possible to effectively and synergistically use livestock, urban and agro-industrial organic waste (OW). From a waste management standpoint, aerobic digestion (composting) and anaerobic digestion are the most obvious and operational processes for OW treatment prior to soil application. Composting OW is seen as an effective method for diverting organic materials from landfills, while reducing the waste volume, eliminating pathogens and creating a stable product suitable for application in crop fields. Anaerobic digestion has also significantly increased in several European countries and represents an opportunity to convert OW into biogas and organic fertilizer (digestate). The choice of using either raw OW, compost or digestate as fertilizer and soil amendment should be based on a comprehensive assessment of potential benefits and negative effects. Among these negative effects, the lack of understanding regarding the impact of treatments on contaminant speciation, microbial pathogen selection and antimicrobial resistance emergence, and the scarcity of knowledge on the fate of contaminants following soil OW application are key scientific challenges that the DIGESTATE project aims to meet. The overall objective of DIGESTATE is to develop an original environmental assessment of OW treatments and agricultural recycling. Such environmental assessment involves estimation of environmental consequences (positive and negative) expected to result from OW treatment and recycling scenarios prior to decision making. This assessment will include indicators which are: (i) conventional (agronomic quality of the OW; energy recovery of treatment processes) and (ii) non-standard (fate of contaminants following OW application in water-soil-plant systems). We will focus our efforts on the ecodynamics of three main classes of contaminants in water-soil-plant systems: (i) trace elements: Cu and Zn, (ii) organic pollutants: PAHs, nonylphenols and pharmaceuticals and (iii) microbial pathogens and antimicrobial resistance genes. We will compare the impact of two major digestion treatments (composting, anaerobic digestion and their combination) on: (i) the speciation of organic and inorganic contaminants, the selection of particular microbial groups and genetic properties in OW, and (ii) the fate (phytoavailability and transport in soil) of contaminants after soil OW application. The scientific programme is based on laboratory experiments, modeling tools and multidisciplinary approaches. First, contaminant quantification and speciation will be assessed for selected raw and treated OW (WP1). Then fundamental knowledge will be produced on contaminant-bearing phases formed during OW treatment (WP2). After OW spreading on a soil, the proportion of contaminants taken up by plants or transported through the soil will be experimentally quantified (WP3). The experimental and modelling datasets from WP1, 2 and 3 will finally fuel the environmental assessment of OW treatment and recycling based on innovative assessment methodologies (WP4).