- Could you briefly describe SLAM-B?
Olivier Therond: SLAM-B is a five-year project that began on April 1, 2023. It has brought together personnel from INRAE, CIRAD, and CNRS as well as various universities and agricultural educational institutions. Contributing to the project are around 90 permanent staff from 40 different research laboratories, and we are currently recruiting over 30 additional people for positions as PhDs, post-docs, and engineers. Because of the funding situation, we have no private-sector partnerships. SLAM-B is being coordinated by Laurie Hamelin, Bernard Kurek, and myself. We are all INRAE researchers.
- What is SLAM-B’s international significance?
Olivier Therond: The Paris Agreement and the French and European low-carbon strategies are driven by the idea that we must undergo a transition, or even a complete break with the past. The central question is thus the following: how do we achieve carbon neutrality, given that regions have their own pedoclimatic conditions, cropping systems, production systems, and industries and given that they will each have a different starting and ending point? Consequently, the challenge is to help stakeholders thoughtfully design this transition, accounting for the biophysical and sociotechnical specificities of their regions. Moreover, we will help design of bioeconomic industries (i.e., chains linking biomass production, transformation, utilisation, and recycling) that will make carbon neutrality possible and potentially deliver a balanced range of ecosystem services. The bioeconomy will help address a key challenge: how do we generate food and non-food products, notably energy, biomaterials, and biomolecules, while also conserving natural resources. This multifaceted objective—to produce foods and non-foods while also protecting natural resources—is the theoretical essence of the bioeconomy. That said, it is tricky because, if we exploit ever greater amounts of biomass, we may place greater pressure on the environment and continue to negatively affect water resources, soils, biodiversity, and ecosystem services.
- SLAM-B is aiming to build a green circular bioeconomy. Can you explain what this means and how the project will work towards this objective?
Olivier Therond: Yes, we are focused on building a green circular bioeconomy. Our goal is to combine biobased production, circularity, and agroecological production systems to achieve carbon neutrality, sustainability, and resilience. People frequently talk about the circular economy, meaning an economy that strives to reduce the consumption of materials and, consequently, waste. This concept is illustrated by industrial symbioses, systems in which one company's waste becomes another company's raw materials. When building a sustainable bioeconomy, it is important that the agricultural and forestry systems generate biomass while also supplying diverse ecosystem services. In other words, agroecological systems are needed. It is only then that we obtain a bioeconomy that combines a circular economy with agroecological principles. It is this pathway that will allow us to generate food and non-food products while also conserving natural resources, the target outcome mentioned above.
- Can you discuss the three major challenges that SLAM-B is tackling?
Olivier Therond: The first challenge is methodological: we will be developing modelling tools to support stakeholders. These tools are all part of MAELIA, a modelling platform that can be used to simulate regional scenarios for structuring biomass industries. More specifically, we will be expanding MAELIA’s current functionalities so that the platform can deal with existing biomass industries (i.e., agriculture and forestry) as well as certain biomass fluxes within cities, notably those related to biobased construction materials. Our broader aim is for the platform to become capable of simulating the structure and function of regional biomass industries. Then, we will be able to assess industry sustainability and resilience using a wide range of indicators.
The second challenge is to show that MAELIA can be useful to stakeholders. Thus, we want to provide a proof of concept by using the platform within exploratory living labs—what we call scenario labs—that are intended to represent real-life conditions. We chose six scenario labs that vary greatly in biophysical conditions, industry type, and stakeholder system. Four are located in mainland France: in the Vosges, near Reims, in Brittany, and in the Louvèze Basin north of Mont Ventoux. The two others are found elsewhere: one is on Réunion Island, and one is in Senegal, in the area where the Great Green Wall initiative is underway. There, we will be looking at two very different types of farming systems.
The third challenge is to develop modelling methods that can be used to assess scenarios at national and European scales. The target policymakers or stakeholders are not the same as in the scenario labs, which involve much smaller scales. Instead, the goal is to evaluate scenarios of bioeconomy development that can inform the work of French or even European Union policymakers. For example, some issues we need to consider are the potential for biomass production, biomass transformation via anaerobic digestion and, consequently, the potential for biogas production in Europe, as well as questions around energy efficiency. One such question is whether building this type of bioeconomy would improve energy efficiency at the systems level? We will also develop what we call MAELIA France, a new tool that could guide national policymaking around the bioeconomy.
- MAELIA is therefore a crucial part of SLAM-B. Where did it come from? Why is it so important?
Olivier Therond: MAELIA is a platform for modelling and simulating agricultural landscapes and regional bioeconomies. It has been in development at INRAE for 12 years. The past few years, CIRAD has been contributing too. MAELIA was created to explore interactions between agricultural systems and water resources, such as the issues associated with irrigation. Over time, it has expanded to deal with other topics, such as the regional management of organic matter and biological regulation. More recently, there has been a greater interest in regional bioeconomic issues. Specifically, we are better able to model different biomass industries within regions and to assess their degree of complementarity. As biomass usage increases, environmental pressures may grow to a level that makes it impossible to achieve the three main objectives of the bioeconomy. To our knowledge, MAELIA is one of the only tools that can individually represent all the value-chain links within a given industry, meaning the agricultural systems, processing systems, and recycling systems. It is worth noting that other tools have been developed elsewhere in the world by communities of geographers, but they represent agricultural systems with rather broad strokes. These other tools cannot be used to model agroecological systems at fine scales or ascertain the degree to which the resulting biomass, once transformed and recycled, can boost sustainability and resilience to target levels.
- What are the main expected results of your work?
Olivier Therond: MAELIA will remain free software. The new version arising from SLAM-B will be much more comprehensive in its representations, simulations, and evaluation capacities. The platform is modular, meaning it can integrate various models to better represent regional bioeconomies, which are complex systems. Thus, the models produced by FairCarboN’s other target projects can further augment MAELIA’s functionalities and scope.
Additionally, we are going to develop an approach for guiding stakeholders and offer platform training programmes, particularly to help stakeholders with scenario design. We will also share our regional-level findings with the stakeholders involved in the scenario labs. With national and European stakeholders, we will share our broader-scale findings, which will point to the best pathways for building the bioeconomy and achieving carbon neutrality.
