Do the sustainable development territorial strategies help for designing ecological engineering projects? Some cases studies in the French South Alps

Abstract

Ecological engineering projects affect spaces belonging to territories on which environmental and social questions are addressed. Those questions have to be taken in account in the design of projects at the local scale. Territorial charters or management plans are documents displaying territorial sustainable development strategies. In this work one examines the possibility to use those documents in order to identify the territorial scale specifications with which the ecosystems and landscape design has to comply. Documents describing five territorial strategies in the French South Alps have been studied. We found that territorial sustainable development charts built on an environment centred prospect are a relevant information resource for defining the global characteristic and functionalities of the sustainable ecosystems, which have to be designed.