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Project Topic
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The recent report by the Mediterranean Experts on Climate and Environmental Change informs that Mediterranean is heavily impacted by climate change and alerts that within a very short time horizon, the impact on the environment, and in particular on agro-ecosystem landscapes which rural communities depend on for their livelihood, is set to worsen dramatically. Proven, cost-effective Nature-based Solutions (NbSs) are able to address these challenges, but their uptake in rural Mediterranean areas has been far too limited. Mara-Mediterra brings together a highly interdisciplinary, cross-border partnership from eight countries. Our goal is to come up with novel approaches to address the hitherto low uptake of nine such proven agro-ecological practices and four novel eco-engineering solutions aimed at tackling desertification, water and soil salinization, water pollution and wetland degradation. Our approach adopts the concept of Living Labs bring together over 150 stakeholders from the local to the national level in five hotspots of water and land degradation. An open innovation ecosystem of five Case Studies around Mediterranean will be established with, at its epicentre, a hub of agri-environmental NbSs as a thematic park of knowledge exchange, interaction, and support. Farmers and local community representatives as our key stakeholders, will experimentally trial our array of solutions in small-scale, yet real-life settings, focusing on sustainable agriculture, exploitation of non-conventional water resources, and circular bioeconomy. Feedback, including perceived values and attitudes, will be compared with testimonials of men and women who successfully adopted these practices in similar settings. The next thrust of our approach will be to collect ‘bottom-up’ action plans using a Participatory GIS tool and showcase how participatory decision-making in both water and land management can be put to real-life practice. The impact brought by the actions plans, covering an aggregate area of 2.300 square kilometers, will be quantified through the development of a Diagnostic Tool that will be harmonized with the new ISO standard to combat land degradation, which sets a framework that is inextricably linked to the achievement of the SDGs of eradicating poverty, ensuring food security, protecting the environment and using natural resources sustainably. In addition, a dynamic water allocation decision-support tool will be developed to guide on trade-offs between competing sectorial demands to reach an optimum allocation of water for all. Our final thrust will be to explore investment routes that would see the implementation of the action plans. Since our Diagnostic Tool will assess the achievement of SDGs, it follows the same evaluation grid as international funding agencies use. Endorsement by national authorities is essential, as the engagement with these international agencies is obtained at this level, but also since the buy-in from national authorities typically opens up investment opportunities from national banks. At the local level, microfunding and microfinancing has been extended to more than 300 million local stakeholders worldwide, more than half of which were among the poorest in their societies. We will explore the complement to this with a Mediterranean solidarity approach. Our products and services, based on cross-border knowledge sharing and involving all actors, from the local to the national level, and by mobilizing investment, will bring about the gains that can be achieved from having water bodies and landscapes restored to their good ecological status. By launching an advocacy campaign for policy improvement and recommendations in the form of policy briefs, we will address legal and institutional impediments to the uptake of our products and services, while the thematic park of NbSs in Greece will bring a lasting legacy of our cross-border effort which we deem essential in the face of the global climate change.
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