As part of its mandate to promote biodiversity and local skills, the Fondation d'entreprise Hermès is focusing on how the knowledge and expertise involved in local agriculture can help preserve and maintain biodiversity.
Proposals for action research must show the extent to which they will promote local practices and expertise for sustainable management of biodiversity. For this reason, they should focus on:
- identifying and characterizing the interfaces between producers and consumers that are most relevant to achieving the aim of linking economic development and biodiversity management;
- analyzing the most effective processes, rules and practices within these interfaces;
- analyzing their capabilities to preserve biodiversity;
- specifying the type of support required for local producers and/or interfaces (or any other local stakeholder in the commercial chain);
- studying the best conditions for the dissemination of local practices and expertise that are most favourable to reinforcing the resilience of local communities;
- determining the conditions of replicability of such schemes to help other communities adapt to the current standards and constraints.
Preference will be given to projects that cannot be funded by traditional research channels (ANR, FP7 etc ..., which may be specified in the proposal), and that encourage support for local communities, while allowing an evaluation of the impact of these approaches in terms of biodiversity.
Deadline: April 15, 2011