Project description

Climate variations have always impacted agro-pastoral productivity and human activities particularly in the Mediterranean Basin, a region where societies with various modes of organization emerged at an early stage. AMEDEES (Adaptation of MEDiterranean Economics of Environmental Stresses) project is mainly focus to study the socio-ecological dynamics of the Mediterranean region, and how socio-economic factors influenced the nature of adaptation to climatic change and other environmental changes. This project involves several disciplines namely climatology, ecology, agronomy, archaeology, history and economics. Several laboratories, CEREGE, IMBE, GREQAM, Centre Camille Jullian, LA3M, are involved in this project.

Within the framework of this project, the methodology is based on (1) the global data (available from lacustrine sediments, tree-rings and speleothems), (2) local databases (collected by archaeologists and historian and will be incorporated in the ARKEOGIS database) and (3) on an integrated computation modeling approach. For the modelling side, LOVECLIM, a coupled ocean-atmosphere-vegetation model of intermediate complexity, will drive models of natural ecosystems (BIOME4, MAIDENiso) via a statistical downscaling of climate. This chain of models will be constrained as a whole by the proxy databases. Data assimilation using Bayesian methodology will be applied to the integrated climate proxy model. Further, the optimised model will be coupled to an agrosystem model (LPJmL) adapted to Mediterranean crops and pastoralism and to a socio-economic model (an agent-based model) in order to better understand and evaluate the impact of climatic stresses on resources and decision making.