Contenu du sommaire

Eastern Thessaly is a plain bordered by semi-mountainous landscape. The region is home to dairy sheep and goat farming systems exploiting both public and private agro-pastoral resources. The effect of decoupled payments, decreasing prices for irrigated cotton and groundwater depletion bring back complementarities between semi-mountainous breeding systems and plain-located productions (fodder crops). In parallel, the high unemployment rate and the decreasing incomes caused by Greek crisis are leading to conversion of activity in dairy sheep and goat farming, based on communal rangeland grazing. This farming activity is often characterized by a semi-subsistence economy with low cost, fully or partially exploring common spaces. Those two evolutions are promising because their combination in the same agrarian system could lead to complementarities in spatial management in favor of the development of small-ruminant farming systems. However, they face many limits to their development : current irrigated cropping systems are highly dependent on historically based decoupled payments, which represent more than 65 % of their farming income. On the contrary, reconversion breeding systems based on rangeland utilization suffer from scant support from European subsidies, and yield low reproductive and productive parameters due to a lack of production means and technical information. Uncertain orientations of the new Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and economic situation in Greece will not allow the current farm income support to be maintained, nor the support for rural development. We must therefore guide agricultural development towards decreasing production costs and enhancing product value, through farming practices adapted to local fodder crops and development of local production networks. This article aims at showing how economic crisis and long-term European subsidies have shaped the agrarian system of Eastern Thessaly, and seeks to identify specific needs of regional dairy sheep breeding systems.

Extraterritoriality seems to be a crucial factor in the different building processes of territories planned as strategic spaces geared to economic globalization. A phenomenon at the center of social representations, it highlights the question of ex nihilo territorial development projects disconnected from the existing spatial configurations. Extraterritoriality is often mentioned in studies on new methods of urban development (urban projects in the cities of the Arab world) and analysis of territories adapted to economic globalization such as free zones. This paper cites the example of the Aqaba Special Economic Zone in Jordan, to explain several features of extraterritoriality and attempts to reveal bottom-line issues of their territorialization.

Scientific doxa and media rumor have together affirmed the assumption that Tuvalu is bound to disappear because of the sea level rise. This disappearance is regarded as irreversible and the clear evidence for the complete responsibility of global warming. It raises questions therefore about the legal reality of a deterritorialized State, and about the identity of a community forced into exile. There is a striking gap between the dreamlike image associated with a tropical coral archipelago and the hard daily life of its inhabitants in a poor environment. More than the inescapable sea level rise, they are mostly concerned with rainfall deficits, the profusion of household waste, water-supply salinization and pollution of their fresh water lens. This is particularly true on the main island, Fongafale, where more than 5 000 inhabitants are living on less than 150 hectares. Although confronted with these alarmist forecasts, the Tuvaluans refuse to anticipate the end of the 21st Century presumed to be the moment when they would be forced to become the first “climate refugees”. They are attached to their territory despite their hard life, but are still far from being mobilized to overcome the difficulties they have to face, in obvious contrast with the idyllic image associated with coral islands.

Based on a literature review, this article analyses the implications of climate change on the evolution of coastal risks, namely coastal erosion and marine inundation, in small tropical islands. Examination of theoretical knowledge and available instrumental data combined with case studies demonstrate that climate change impacts are and will continue to be highly variable in the future both between island regions and from one island to another. Based on the analysis of the spatial variability of climate-related and human-induced pressures and their implications on current and future coastal risks, the author shows that the trajectories of vulnerability in both mountainous and reef islands are highly differentiated. Her findings from an updated review and in-depth analysis of available case studies bring into relief the diversified vulnerability profiles of reef islands, highlighting the key insights brought by recent studies. This paper outlines recent progress in the identification of the drivers controlling change in small islands and the implications of their interactions on the differentiation of vulnerability profiles. Beyond this, it analyses the factors constraining our capacity not only to detect change in small islands, but also to attribute observed changes to climate change. The constraints posed by climate variability and human interference with natural processes are more particularly discussed. Finally, at the crossroads of theoretical and empirical knowledge, this article proposes a first typology of the chains of impact of climate change in reef islands.