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In the middle of the last century, the emergence of a new risk, the climate risk, was a sudden and largely unexpected phenomenon that has significantly changed our vision of environmental issues. Of course, the link between humans and nature is strong and ancient: a country like France has very few landscapes that have not been shaped by generations of builders, foresters or farmers. But climate change linked to greenhouse gas emissions has brought about a radically new problem, whose novelty results from its very nature. The risk of climate change was revealed by equations or very indirect observations, before it was even really observable. But the speed of its progression, with greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere which have so far never stopped increasing and accelerating their growth, has made a huge difference. Moreover, this evolution has developed in a context where it has been intimately intertwined with other rapidly changing issues: energy, environmental, social, political and demographic. However, despite the variety of warning signals put forward by the scientific community, despite the now widely shared recognition of the existence of strong climate challenges, the dynamics with which these changes have developed, very often remain underestimated and even misunderstood. Climate risk is still very often associated with a certain form of immobility, marked by the repetition of discourse that gives the impression that the stakes have changed little over the last few decades. This incomplete awareness is one of the most important brakes on the development of effective environmental policies, because it erases an essential dimension of current climate issues: we are facing a problem that is very advanced in its development and everything is no longer possible today. The future world will necessarily be marked by the need to arbitrate between partially contradictory issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biodiversity offsetting relies on scientific hypotheses that are barely investigated. The aim of this paper is first to explore under what conditions it is possible to envisage biodiversity compensation from the perspectives of ecological science and planning policies. Two fundamental assumptions are scrutinized: the issue of substitution of a given ecological entity and the possibility to choose a given spatial and temporal reference for the dynamics of this entity. While scientific studies conducted on ecological systems have regularly emphasized the historicity of biological dynamics and the irrelevance of referring to a balance of nature, biodiversity offsetting principles rest on those out-dated assumptions. More specifically, the analysis of a practical case reveals that compensation proceeds by replacing the specificities of ecological entities by exogenous spatial and temporal framings. This process suggests that compensation should be viewed as a tool for the technoscientific reconfiguration of ecological problems. The temporal and spatial limits imposed by ecological entities are encapsulated in a political system specifically built to push back the boundaries of economic and urban development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]