 The story I would like to tell you today is about a lake, a beautiful lake in the middle of the desert in Tombuktu in northern Mali, the Lake Fagibin. This lake was providing livelihoods for different people, for pastoralists, fishermen, for women, for men, for children, and everybody was using the area around the lake. This lake was so important that some NGOs in the 80s decided to protect the edge of the lake with the prosopis. The prosopis, I think some people know that, is a very invasive species, but it's also a very drought resistant species. So the lake was suddenly protected with these trees, but what happens in the 90s is that, unfortunately, this lake dried out. When this lake dried out, people lost their livelihoods, they lost the fishermen, they lost the fish, no agriculture, no pastoralists. And people were struggling how to deal with this change because it was a dramatic environmental change. What happens after that is that the prosopis, of course, took the area of the lake and suddenly we have a forest. So it was a lake and it became a forest. And can you imagine now people who were fishermen, suddenly having prosopis forests and they don't know what to do with this forest? That is what we wanted to understand. And we were there as a civil scientist to understand the vulnerability of people, but also to understand their adaptive capacity. How do they deal with such a situation? We talked to women, to men, to young people, to old people to understand the kind of the perception of the whole community. The first thing we found out, it was that the strategy of men is different from the strategy of women because the first thing men did was to migrate here to the mining areas in the southern of the country or in other countries like to Algeria or Mauritania or Libya. This strategy changed the whole structure of the villages because then suddenly we had communities where we had women, some young men, kids and older people. So the whole social structure of the community changed when this strategy happened when men migrated. So what we saw when we arrived there that women had to take over a lot of activities which were in the past done by men. So we find out that their vulnerability actually increased because they are adapting to two things. They are adapting to the climate variability, but they are also adapting to the migration of men, which is an adaptive strategy. So we also find out that not only women and men are different, but also women were different because some women couldn't do some strategies because they were culturally restricted in their mobility. They couldn't move to this forest, for instance, to use it. And what was interesting is that actually the poorest women in the society were the one who could take advantage of these new resources, of the new ecosystem services which were mostly wood and charcoal. We were not expecting to see that because when you think of vulnerabilities, you think all the poorest is the most vulnerable. And we were very surprised to find that it is not true. Then when we looked more in this process, we saw that charcoal production was taken by the poorest women and it couldn't be used by other women because this women were in the higher class of the society and they are not able to do charcoal. So suddenly they became the ones who are vulnerable in this new situation while the poorest women could improve their livelihood, they could have increased food security and decreased their vulnerability. So their adaptive capacity was actually in this situation suddenly higher than other groups where they were the marginalized ones in the past. So we have a completely shifting in social relations. But what we found also is that even though the women, they had these autonomous adaptation strategies, the problem was that there is a lack of knowledge. Those women, they were all pastoralists or they were farmers and suddenly they have to make charcoal. And we found out that extension services but also other services were not themselves adapted to the change which happened in the society and in the environment. Also in terms of market, the market was very far for those women and they couldn't take advantages of this strategy even though they were engaged in producing charcoal, they had to sell it in the market in the village. In terms of land tenure, it was the same problem because it's interesting when the lake became a forest, the land tenure also changed because forest is under the government while the lake and the lake area was managed by communities so people lost also their access and suddenly those women were illegal, using charcoal illegal. What I mean here is that when we think in vulnerabilities, we need to unveil a lot of complexity at the local level. Communities are not the same, they are not a homogenous group, they have different rights, different access and this is what we need to understand deeply if we want to avoid maladaptive actions. We also need to understand the different roles which are related to different social status or ethnic groups if we want to avoid to have also maladaptive actions because we don't understand the pattern of vulnerabilities which also are very dynamic as I showed here. What I want to say here is that when we think landscape, we need to think two things. They are environmental lives but they are also social lives of landscape and those two lives are very important, they are linked to each other and we need always to link them when we think vulnerability adaptation. We need also to overcome fragmentation in the knowledge. We need to build bridges between local communities, national stakeholders, between policy, between project but also always we need to understand the vulnerability at the local level because adaptation happens locally. I choose this picture, it's not from the Sahel because I think that this thought or this experience is also maybe interesting for other regions or interesting wherever people interact with nature because we shape nature but also nature shapes social structures, shapes societies and we need always to understand both of them. Thank you very much.