In 2018, the agreement between the French CNRS and the University of Arizona was extended to include the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), Paris, as a third partner. iGLOBES is hosted by the UA Biosphere 2 department and located on the UA main campus in Tucson.

The vision

iGLOBES aims to establish a hub of collaborative interactions between the French scientific community and UA to foster interdisciplinary research on global environmental challenges. iGLOBES is thus designed to strengthen international cooperation between French and American researchers, in social, physical, and natural sciences. Essential to iGLOBES vision is its role in training the next generations of interdisciplinary global researchers at the interface of social and environmental sciences. At the core of iGLOBES, scientific agenda is the question of sustainable life and living in extreme environments, in the regional and historical context of arid lands and transboundary systems.

Research projects

Current projects at iGLOBES involve sociologists, geographers, anthropologists, archaeologists, ecologists, and planetary scientists, and span four main themes:

• Cooperation, conflict, and policy for water resources in the arid Americas;
• The governance of natural resources and sparsely populated areas in the Americas; 
• Ecological and societal adaptation and collapse in response to extreme climate events;
• How extreme environments encountered on Earth and in the universe shape our sense of life and nature. 

iGLOBES also supports research carried out by the “Pima County Observatory”, which is a member of the French Human-Environment Observatory network program funded under the DRIIHM Laboratory Of Excellence. The Pima County Observatory awards seed grants on an annual basis, to promote innovative research focusing on the Sonoran Desert environment that benefits French-U.S. collaboration.