Faced with the climate and societal crisis, we now need to change our lifestyles to make them more sober and attentive to the challenges of the biosphere that surrounds us, the foundation of our lives.
Nature-based solutions are therefore a potential solution, as they propose to be based on the thousand-year-old engineering of living organisms to capture available energy and enhance ecosystem services, while taking care of the biosphere.
But these solutions do not exist “turnkey.” We must test them, adapt them to local constraints and learn how to implement them, master the processes; Finally, we must be able to assess the impacts.
With nature-based solutions, we are thus entering into the dynamic of “care,” the 4 pillars of which are as follows:
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Pay attention to the environment in which you are part ;
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Demonstrating responsibility towards the living world and future generations ;
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Deploy and adapt permanently the skills you need ;
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Take the time to evaluate and redirect if necessary.
This is what we are trying to promote with CARDIMED Demo 5 in Marseille, for which EMPAN is the technical guarantor and which implements unsealing soils and planting vegetation in the city to infiltrate rainwater into the soil, and thus revitalize these soils, allow biodiversity to find habitats, avoid pollution of receiving ecosystems, and offer islands of freshness to urban dwellers.
Solutions which are locally tested and implemented consist of :
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Initially, set up permeable soils of different kinds: open ground where possible, permeable concrete or bitumen where significant traffic (pedestrian or car flows of users) or heavy machinery (emergency or delivery vehicles) are planned ;
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At the same time, guide the rainwater’s flow as much as possible towards permeable surfaces in order to recharge the groundwater tables, by working on the topography of the site ;
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Planting trees, shrubs, bushes, and annual vegetation in a diversified way to create favourable habitats to biodiversity and sources of freshness.
At the heart of the university’s campuses, EMPAN offers technical solutions, mobilizes and coordinates the network of teachers, researchers, and students to develop transdisciplinary solutions, test them, evaluate them, and learn together by doing, to continuously improve the layout.
