Glasgow School of Art
Innovation School
Product Design
Year 4
Self Initiated Project.
Degree project.
​
Individual project.
3 month project
​
Global warming is a vast and complex subject. The impact is already visible, with more than 80 French departments suffering water restrictions during a summer period that is getting longer every year. All of these consequences must push us to rethink our rituals associated with water.
Edward Hopper
Can we anticipate a future in which water and its environment are considered and managed differently?
How does global warming work?
Vicious circles created by the human.
In France, "the near future of the country, by 2050, is essentially already written", the "climate shock is inevitable", "France is not ready to face them". (Ronan Dantec and Jean-Yves Roux).
​
Droughts are becoming more frequent and our water resources are disappearing, which has serious consequences for our natural environment and therefore a strong impact on biodiversity.
In the past, the human species has already had to adapt to extreme climatic episodes, notably to several periods of cooling; between 1303 and 1860, we note in January 1709: -16.3 degrees in Paris. "France will be in an alarming situation around 2080. According to the IPCC's current forecast, between 2080 and 2100 we will be crushed by heatwaves...
​
In a retransmission of the France Culture Forum at the Grand Amphithéâtre de la Sorbonne, Agathe Euzen, Luc Abbadie, Marc Fontcave and Jean-François Soussana discuss the notion of human adaptation to global warming. "Would adaptation be admitting defeat? How to make mitigation and adaptation to global warming compatible? "
From these exchanges and questioning, we can draw some conclusions on the fact that we have to deal with the issue of adaptation at the local level.
Climate zones are moving faster and faster, animal and plant species are moving. We should be prepared to "understand where the species assemblages are and then go through a phase of chaos, of community destruction, and then we will return to a certain balance. The living species is not threatened by global warming, it is its appearance that will just evolve." We should anticipate this fall and the evolution of biodiversity.
​
According to the article in the newspaper Le Monde, "EU fails to adopt carbon neutrality in 2050", June 2019, we are shown that the soils of our planet will be 90% degraded by 2050, "arable land is losing its nutritive qualities, the earth is losing its structure." It is our consumption patterns and population growth that are "putting unprecedented pressure on the planet's natural resources."
​
​
​
​
I went to high school in the Basque country in the south of France and Spain and I have been living there for a year now, on the French side.
The Basque Country is a border area with Spain, the climate is hot in summer, cold in winter and quite rainy all year round. It is an area located between the sea and the mountains. So I decided to develop my diploma project centred on the life and ecosystem of this region. I will only talk about the French side which is more simply at my disposal for my research.
The climatic impacts of the Basque Country, in the south-west of France, are :
- The degradation of the cryosphere,
- The scarcity or disappearance of water resources such as groundwater,
-Frosts,
-Floods,
-Drought,
-Extreme temperatures,
-storms.