David Ambrosetti - Climatic and Environmental Challenges: Learning from the Horn of Africa

In the prospect of the COP21 held in Paris in December 2015, the French Centre for Ethiopian Studies (CFEE) organised a scientific conference on environmental and climatic changes in the horn of Africa, with a decisive financial support of the Institut franais (Fonds dAlembert), Paris. The conference was part of a larger event, called the Road to Paris and organised by the French Embassy to Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa Regional Environment Centre and Network (HoA-REC&N), Addis Ababa University, in HoA-REC&N headquarters at Gullele Botanic Gardens, Addis Ababa, from 7 to 9 April 2015.

In this event, our first purpose was to set aside from the pressure of short-term and policy-oriented concerns raised by the international bureaucracies and bilateral donors, as to try to explore diverse, cross-disciplinary dimensions related to environmental change in the region in a wider way, wider in time and also wider in the elements observed. In a way, the Road to Paris event has also showed, with the various stakeholders and speakers it has gathered, that the issue of climate change has solidified automatic discourses, supporting wishful intentions and thinking, and clearly embedded in the building of professional opportunities and international careers. These discourses, indeed, are everything but close to the reality observed on the ground.

In this new, competitive, social field, priority may not be easily given to scientific exploration that is not directly policy-oriented and that requires a longer time to produce strong data than what the political and bureaucratic agendas allow. One could not state, though, that interest for science is totally absent in these arenas on climate change. But, invariably, public expectations appear to be much too high in scope and in time, compared to what intellectual curiosity and scientific processes and protocols can produce on a day-to-day basis. Improving awareness on environmental changes should start here: to give a better understanding on the complexity and multiplicity of factors involved in the relation between human evolution, societal choices and developments, and natural environments.

The French Centre for Ethiopian Studies (CFEE) in Addis Ababa was quite well equipped to initiate, with its partners, such a cross-disciplinary exploration. In its 25-year long history (not mentioning here its own prehistory bringing back to the permanent presence of French archaeologists in Ethiopia from the 1950s till 1974), it has been leading and supporting research in the Horn of Africa in various topics of direct or indirect interest for the matter of environmental changes, notably:

- the deep past of the humankind and its environments, thanks to the paleo-anthropological mission Jean-Renaud Boisserie has been leading on the Shungura Formation (Southern Omo) since 2006, in direct collaboration with the Authority for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage (ARCCH) of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia;

- the medieval and modern history of Ethiopia, thanks to our long-lasting collaboration with Deresse Ayenachew and the department of history and management of cultural heritage he is leading at Debre Berhan University, also with Margaux Herman through her historical investigation on women and gender in the Ethiopian history;

- as well as more contemporary and socio-political issues, such as the administration of land and the effects of the current constitution of the cadastre on the management of the Ethiopian natural parks, studied by Mehdi Labzae, the making of the Ethiopian heritage as a tool of national conscience awareness supported by foreign experts, explored here by Thomas Guindeuil, or the intervention of international organisations and their relations with the states in the region, studied by David Ambrosetti.