Contenu du sommaire : Aspects du développement dans l'océan Indien.

The weight of physical constraints in the development of Maldives State Atolls (Indian Ocean). Physical constraints are very high in atoll States and they imply high development costs. International tourism helps financing national development. But there are environmental degradations, and the authorities of small island States such as Maldives have to face serious management issues.

The Determined Policies of Eradicating Insanitary and Run-Down Housing in the Island of Reunion from 1946 to Our day. Eliminating the forms of run-down housing in Reunion Island is a basic task to which the Public Authorities have vowed themselves since the departementalization of the territory, which was decided in 1946. The purpose of this article is to disclose the results of the efforts accomplished over the past forty years in spite of the strong population growth and the continued rural exodus. The author points out that the present tendancy is to go beyond the traditional programs, aiming above all to give better homes to people, and stressing a growing interest in achieving a true integration of the new population groups as regards collective life in city quarters.

The Determined Policies of Eradicating Insanitary and Run-Down Housing in the Island of Reunion from 1946 to Our day. Eliminating the forms of run-down housing in Reunion Island is a basic task to which the Public Authorities have vowed themselves since the departementalization of the territory, which was decided in 1946. The purpose of this article is to disclose the results of the efforts accomplished over the past forty years in spite of the strong population growth and the continued rural exodus. The author points out that the present tendancy is to go beyond the traditional programs, aiming above all to give better homes to people, and stressing a growing interest in achieving a true integration of the new population groups as regards collective life in city quarters.

The State Marks of Legislation in the Extension of Reafforestation in Madagascar. In Madagascar, due to the very fast deforestation for few decades, the afforestation is one of the economic and environmental priority from the outset of the beginning of the XXth century. Until the middle of the 1980's, the state impose to peasants and afforestation which despised their real requirements, but, since, this situation has changed. At the beginning of the 1990's, the necessity to integrate the peasants into the management of their own environment resources was at last declaimed, and they are confronted with a big problem restricting a lot the extension of afforestation : a safe legal access to news parcels. Indeed, the landed legislation, founded on land registering, is answerable to very long and expensive appropriation procedures and to big insecurity about the rights on the parcels. So, because of the peasants 'poverty, they are very few to invest themselves into planting on parcels which are not own and this atmospher of mistrust organize a limp planting dynamic which must be broken in order to reforme the island woody reserve.

The Violent Tropical Storm Daniella and the Prevailing Ocean Temperatures (1996). The example of Daniella, which occurred at the beginning of December 1996 in the southwestern part of the Indian Ocean, contributes to clarifying the link that exists between a minimal atmospheric pressure at the ocean surface in a tropical storm, and the ocean temperature. Daniella is remarkable for the pressure, 905-910 hpa, and for the speed with which it intensified, a phenomenon that has been rarely observed in the region, with a decrease of 60 hpa in 24 hours, whereas the storm moved slowly over an ocean the temperature of which had been between 27 and 27.2 °C two days earlier. The weak speed of Daniella's movement (8 kms per hour) created a situation where the ocean-air interactions continued longer, enabling the strong winds ahead of the eye of the storm to blow hard enough to cool the ocean. And it is over an ocean space of a temperature of 26.5 °C that the central pressure of the storm continued to drop, going from 930 to 905- 910 hPa on December 5th to 18.00 UTC. Observations made in other storm basins as well as the conclusions drawn from numeric models had until then indicated that an ocean temperature of at least 28 °C was necessary to produce a storm with an air pressure comparable to that of Daniella. Four hours after having attained its maximum intensity, the powerful meteor already showed signs of " exhaustion ". The rapid heating up, denoted by the heights of the cloudy mass, does indeed mean that an evident weakening of convection is occurring in spite of a configuration that still indicates a great intensity of speed. This process reflects an energy loss due to the cooling off of the ocean. Daniella is among the number of those rare cases of tropical storms whose maximum intensity has approached or reached the potential maximum inten¬ sity " authorized " by the temperature of the ocean, taking into consideration the absences of a dynamic constraint in the upper troposphere.