the project

Floodplains are vulnerable ecosystems. They are essential to our societies, but they are under threat in particular from a global urbanization process. The quantity and quality of water resources, the production of energy and building materials, the conservation of biodiversity and the quality of the living environment, all depend on floodplains.

Over the last few decades, the scientific community has acquired in-depth knowledge on the urbanisation challenges in certain floodplain areas of the world. Despite this, the overall process of urbanisation in floodplains and the state of these environments around the world is still poorly known.

GloUrb project responds to the need to produce knowledge and raise awareness about the floodplain urbanisation issues by:

• identifying global references to better understand the processes involved and the consequences for socio-ecosystems (urbanization process, urban resilience, ecological alteration, impact on biodiversity, environmental justice);
• explaining the observed trends and distinguishing between the influence of local and global drivers;
• informing and raising awareness of these issues among local players and the general public.

GloUrb project will characterise the urbanisation footprints and its effects on socio-ecosystems using existing data, online data mining, remote sensing and signal processing. It will rely on an online information system to promote sustainable, integrated and adaptive management of river corridors, in particular via a web interface for monitoring these changes in the most threatened sectors.


Légende:
1- Revegetation of Rhône riverbanks in Lyon to bring biodiversity back in urban areas (source : https://desespecesparmilyon.fr/blog/lire/a-lyon-victorine-et-quentin-veulent-faire-revivre-la-biodiversite-en-ville).
2- Sabarmati riverbanks in Ahmedabad (India) (picture : L. Bajemon, 2023).
3- The fertile Nil plain and its delta ;
4- Gravel pit lake in South Platte plain in Denver (USA).
5- Artificial structures along the river as it flows the Lhassa city.

GloUrb focuses on the world's largest agglomerations hosting more than 300k inhabitants and located in floodplains. The project has five main objectives : 

Objective 1: To define a worldwide typology of existing cases by cross-referencing agglomerations and floodplains.
Objective 2: To map changes in urbanised river landscapes since the 1980s.
Objective 3: To identify and understand the impacts of urbanisation on landscape structures, habitats, ecological functions and aquatic and terrestrial biodiversity.
Objective 4: To identify and understand the impacts of urbanisation on socio-ecosystemic aspects, including discourse and conflicts, economy and inequalities.
Objective 5: To make the results of the project visible in order to raise collective awareness and set up a system for monitoring impacts and changes.

GloUrb project is composed of 5 Work Packages (WP) :

The project is organized into 5 Work Packages: 

• WP1 aims to develop a global classification of urbanization patterns in floodplains based on existing data. The aim is to understand urbanization dynamics and identify potential impacts on the socio-ecosystems of floodplains.
• WP2 explores the urban transformations and riverscape trajectories of alluvial plains over the last 40 years, using advanced remote sensing and image analysis tools. The expected results are tools and methodologies for analyzing urban pressures on riverscape structures.
• WP3 studies and quantifies the effects of urbanization on the global biodiversity, ecological functioning and socio-environmental issues, in order to support better management of floodplains.
• WP4 is designed to support integrated strategies for the sustainable management of urbanized floodplains, by sharing the knowledge generated with decision-makers, stakeholders and the public via tools such as web applications.
• WP5 concerns the coordination, networking and management of the data produced.

Here are some key references on the subject of urbanization of alluvial plains and for the project : 

• Allen, G. H. & Pavelsky, T. M. Global extent of rivers and streams. Science 361, 585–588 (2018). 13. Linke, S. et al. Global hydro-environmental sub-basin and river reach characteristics at high spatial resolution. Sci Data 6, 1–15 (2019).
• Billet, P. & Chiu, V. Mission de recherche Droit et Justice » Le droit d’accès à la justice environnementale des peuples et des communautés autochtones : http://www.gip-recherche-justice.fr/publication/le-droit-dacces-a-la-justice-environnementale-des-peuples-et-des-communautes-autochtones/
• Butchart, S. H. M. et al. Global Biodiversity: Indicators of Recent Declines. Science 328, 1164–1168 (2010).
• European Commission. Global Human Settlement - GHS POPULATION GRID. https://ghsl.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ghs_pop.php (2015).
• Gibb, R. et al. Zoonotic host diversity increases in human-dominated ecosystems. Nature 1–5 (2020) doi:10.1038/s41586-020-2562-8.
• Naiman, R. J. et al. Legitimizing Fluvial Ecosystems as Users of Water: An Overview. Environmental Management 30, 455–467 (2002).
• Nardi, F., Annis, A., Di Baldassarre, G., Vivoni, E. R. & Grimaldi, S. GFPLAIN250m, a global high-resolution dataset of Earth’s floodplains. SciData 6, (2019).
• Seto, K. C., Fragkias, M., Güneralp, B. & Reilly, M. K. A Meta-Analysis of Global Urban Land Expansion. PLOS ONE 6, e23777 (2011).
• United Nations. World urbanization prospects: 2018 : highlights. (2019).