The Comb Lab letter : Perspective 2025
As we do every year, Comb Lab would like to extend its best wishes to every reader of our monthly newsletter. May the new year bring satisfaction and success in the projects that you and your loved ones are developing. In this turbulent world, cooperation through personal involvement remains the key to building an enviable future.
Everyone is clearly aware of the weight of the current geopolitical, economic, social, technological and cultural issues at stake. The media hype that surrounds them overshadows the overriding urgency: the need to adapt our lifestyles immediately to the rapid changes in the physical environment from which people derive their livelihood. In such a turbulent context, we are delighted that the Syndicat mixte d’aménagement et de développement des Combrailles (SMADC) is renewing the schéma de cohérence territoriale (SCOT) des Combrailles. We’re counting on the vision of our elected representatives and the contributions of civil society to reinforce the region’s strengths and address its weaknesses, so that new perspectives can emerge.
This point is particularly important because, to make a region – in this case, the Combrailles – resilient, it is of course necessary to reinforce the region’s assets and strengths, but also to explore what is new and anticipate the shocks and disruptions that climatic and geopolitical conditions will inevitably produce. The worst is never certain, so let’s work together to reduce the chances of it happening!
Comb Lab, with its partners, will develop its 2025 programme along three lines:
- Continuation of existing initiatives
- Developing the bocage-food pairing
- Participatory action research, with a complementary strand focusing on disruptive situations.
Actions in progress
La Mallette des Combrailles : With our partners, we are going to enhance this free educational tool.
We also plan to create opportunities to present the Mallette in detail in schools, media libraries, etc.
Climate environment Club: Comb Lab will continue to invest in this Combrailles Sioule et Morge comcom club, as well as in the Fabrique départementale des transitions, to which the club is committed.
Bocage – food pairing
Strengthening the bocage.
After circumstantial difficulties thwarted the launch of this programme in 2022, we are preparing to relaunch this initiative. The aim is to help increase the presence of trees (isolated trees – hedges – copses – forests – garden forests) to create more hedges and multi-species clumps with canopies of varying heights. As well as planting trees and restoring hedgerows, the aim is to raise awareness of the role of trees: keeping the soil alive by stimulating biodiversity, facilitating the infiltration of rainwater into the soil, and encouraging rainfall through the irregularity of the canopy.
This will involve taking part in tree-planting workshops and publishing information for the general public about trees, hedges and woodlands on our website and partner websites. The aim is to encourage people to plant and, for those who don’t have the space, to enrich the way they look at trees, copses and forests.
Comb Lab’s continued involvement in the construction of the Jean-Paul Touveron educational garden in Biollet is part of this drive to strengthen the bocage. This initiative involves the primary schools of Biollet, Charensat and Espinasse. Through the schoolchildren and the customers of the Guinguette in Biollet, we hope that an ever-wider public will take an interest in this garden and its greenhouse
Food.
Comb Lab pays particular attention to the issue of food, which is inextricably linked to the preservation of the bocage.
Given the volatility of the food markets (geopolitical uncertainties plus the effects of climate change), the impoverishment of the soil, the difficulty farmers have in making a living from their work, and the increase in the number of people living in food insecurity, it’s not unreasonable to doubt that the Combrailles region will be able to feed its entire population in sufficient quantity and quality over the next ten years. This is why we are committing ourselves as much as possible to collective actions aimed at ensuring that everyone has decent access to food in the short and medium term. Our approach currently has three areas of involvement:
- Participation in the « food insecurity » technical committee of the territorial food programme (PAT)
- Participation in the organisation of the food forum (17 May 2025) of the PAT. This forum, called Alimentation Origine Combrailles (AOC), aims to bring together local producers and consumers.
- The SSA: As a member of the social food security experimentation group in the Puy-de-Dôme, run by Soli’doume and Cisca, Comb Lab is making a contribution, particularly in the form of economic and forecasting reports based on information from international studies.
Research
The Participatory Action Research project on the resilience of the Combrailles region is being carried out in close cooperation with researchers from the Clermont-Auvergne Centre for Social Innovation (CISCA). In January, we should be able to make up for the delay incurred by Comb Lab at the end of 2024.
Disruptive situations. We plan to establish a link between the climate projections of the AP3C1 programme developed by the Service interdépartemental pour l’animation du Massif central (SIDAM) and the contributions of the Open Lab Exploration Innovation attached to the Centre de Recherche Clermontois en Management, the CleRMa, where researchers and practitioners work on disruptive situations.
The aim of this combination of empirical and academic knowledge is to pinpoint the local challenges of climate change, consider potential disruptive situations at local level and work with local leaders to develop ways of anticipating and building resilience.
Of course, the contributions of all our partners are fundamental to the success of this programme.
Let’s hope that all the transition/resilience initiatives around the world remain driven by the certainty that experimentation at the margins will eventually contaminate the centre, especially when necessity dictates.
1 Launched at the end of 2015 and led by the Service interdépartemental pour l’animation du Massif central (SIDAM), in collaboration with the Chambers of Agriculture of the 11 departments involved, the « Adaptation des Pratiques Culturales au Changement Climatique » (AP3C) research and development project aims to develop tools for analysing and anticipating the impacts of climate change on livestock systems in the Massif Central. The project is unique in that it is working with a climatologist. This climatic expertise will enable us to produce climatic and agro-climatic indicators for the 2050 horizon, in order to gain a better understanding of climate change in our region and its impact on agriculture in the Massif Central.