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6. The use of the RPG during several sessions gathering 6 players (3 mayors,
1 developer, 1 NM representative, 1 DDAF technician) until the 14 villages
involved in the project did participate to a session.
7. Adaptation of NimetPasLeFeu to other ecological conditions and decision of the
Gard Department to become autonomous in running RPG sessions. A facilitator
and a data manager were trained and tested during sessions organised in the
framework of an INTERREG project with mayors and fire prevention experts
from France, Spain, Italy and Portugal.
The approach is based on a mutual comprehension of the elements of the territory
that makes sense with the question asked. This sharing of representations is done by
means of a series of collective workshops during which actors, resources, dynamics
and interactions (ARDI) which make the stakes of the territory are identified and
elicited. To facilitate this sharing, the answers to the questions are formalized into
easily comprehensible diagrams, with a minimum of coding making it possible to
classify the provided information. The role of the facilitator only consists in calling
upon each participant, writing down the proposals in a standard way and asking for
reformulating when the proposal is too generic, enounced with a polysemous word
or can lend to confusion.
In both models, the environment is divided into three neighbouring villages
covering the gradient of urbanization and agricultural land/woodland ratio currently
observed around Nîmes city. It is visualised by means of a cellular automaton
through a spatial grid representing 18 land-use types that can change according to
natural transitions or human activities.
Four categories of social entities are identified: property developers, mayors,
farmers and fire prevention managers. The developers propose new urban devel-
opments according to social demand and land prices. They have to respect the
government regulations (flood hazard, protected areas, urban zoning). Mayors select
an urbanization strategy (to densify, to develop on fallow land, olive groves or
forests), update their urban zoning according to urban land availability and social
demand and make agreements with the developers. When updating the urban
zoning, they can create new roads. Farmers crop their fields using or not current
practices that impact fire hazard (vineyards weeding, stubble ploughing) or adapt
to the economic crisis of certain commodities by uprooting and setting aside
lowland vineyards or olive groves near to urban zones. The fire prevention manager
establishes a fuel break in a strategic place, selected according to fire hazard ranges
in the forest and the possible connections with croplands, as well as available funds
and forest cleaning costs.
Four biophysical models issued from previous researches and adjusted to the
local conditions are integrated to the MAS to account for fallow development, shrub
encroachment, pine overspreading and fire propagation. The model is run at a one-
year time step, the state represented on the map corresponding to the land cover at
the end of June (beginning of the wildfire period). Each participant was invited to
propose a set of key indicators that permit them to monitor key changes on ecologi-
cal or socio-economic aspects. A common agreement was made on what to measure,
on which entity, with which unit and on the way to represent the corresponding