As part of the consortium of the ResAlliance project, we participated in the 8th Mediterranean Forest Week (8th MFW) to foster dialogue on ways to build and enhance landscape resilience to drought and severe wildfires. During the event, which took place from the 4th to the 7th of November in Barcelona, ResAlliance led two activities to widen the network of stakeholders involved in the development and implementation of innovative solutions and science-based policies.
The Mediterranean region is warming at a rate 20% faster than the global average. This exacerbates desertification, drought conditions and the risk of large wildfires, threatening biodiversity, food productivity, water availability and our safety. Building resilient landscapes is key to safeguarding the health of ecosystems and human well-being. ResAlliance aims to enhance landscape resilience in the Mediterranean through innovative research, collaboration and stakeholder engagement in the fields of agriculture and forestry.
On the first day of the 8th MFW, Eduard Mauri, expert at the European Forest Institute and coordinator of the ResAlliance project, and Valentina Romanin, local development project manager at Etifor, presented the work of ResAlliance at an info session organised by the Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Chania, which is part of the CIHEAM network. The project concentrates its activity on five knowledge-exchange and transfer hubs called LandLabs, established in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, and Cyprus, and which the Foundation coordinates. They are hosting participatory events that serve as meeting points for scientists, policymakers, practitioners, and local communities to discuss the challenges, needs and knowledge gaps in their regions, and exchange their solutions. Furthermore, the LandLabs are carrying out in-person work to identify innovative solutions to achieve landscape resilience that are already in practice. These are easily accessible to stakeholders as factsheets. So far, 121 factsheets have been published on the project’s website in English, and soon will also be available in Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian and Greek.
“The outputs ResAlliance is generating seek to support practitioners in enhancing the resilience of the landscape they manage”, states Mauri.
ResAlliance also aims to contribute to policy development and implementation. To this end, a policy forum was held on day two of the 8th MFW, which was coordinated by the Centre for International Forestry Research. The core of this event consisted of a debate facilitated by Eduard Plana, senior researcher at the Forest Science and Technology Centre of Catalonia. The debate identified key barriers to building landscape resilience, including the lack of adaptive and long-term legislation. The opinions expressed by the participants will be part of a White paper on policy recommendations for landscape resilience in the Mediterranean region, led by the Foundation.
“We will write the white paper at the end of the project based on the experiences we will have gathered by then from the LandLabs and the wider network, the LandNet: best practices, requirements, needs, gaps and insights from the professionals we are interacting with. We will transform all the information we are collecting into policy recommendations targeted at high-level agencies.”, explains David Martín, project manager at the Foundation and LandLab coordinator.
After the 8th MFW, ResAlliance enters its last year, full of opportunities to contribute to and benefit from all the knowledge being gathered on enhancing landscape resilience. For example, in-person events such as showrooms of good practices, field visits, exhibitions, other policy forums, etc., and access to useful resources through LandNet. LandNet is a free-access network connecting stakeholders from multiple Mediterranean countries to exchange knowledge, share data and collaborate on landscape resilience initiatives. LandNet members have access to the ‘ResAlliance forum’, launched on the 4th of November, to discuss good practices on landscape resilience, and a MOOC starting next February. They also receive notifications on events happening nearby. Finally, the ResAlliance project will continue promoting good practices.
“We wish that practitioners consult, adopt and implement good practices from the 121 best ones we have collected. Although we have finished collecting these, we invite anyone leading a good practice on landscape resilience in the Mediterranean to share it with us to reach other practitioners in the Mediterranean”, adds Eduard Mauri.
