Resilience is more than a buzzword—it’s a shared responsibility. Explore the insights gained, the 120 good practices tackling natural disturbances, and the policy recommendations that will help to shape the future of Mediterranean farms and forests.
The ResAlliance project has come to an end after three years of work across the Mediterranean. It has been a journey that 16 partners have travelled together, and in some stretches it has not been easy. Now that the word “resilience” is in vogue, over these three years we have experienced what makes it so difficult to apply. Creating landscapes that are resilient to the disturbances influenced by climate change does not depend on a single person, association, company, ministry or government agency. Achieving resilient landscapes requires the collaboration and coordination of multiple entities at different levels.
ResAlliance pursued this ambitious goal: to bring together from farmers and forest owners to ministerial representatives from the agricultural, forestry and environmental sectors around the same table. To make our lives easier, we looked for existing forums where dialogue could be facilitated and knowledge exchange encouraged, but we found very few. So, we had to create our own spaces, such as ad-hoc policy forums. And it was a good idea, as government representatives themselves recognised that these cross-sectoral forums were rare but much needed.
Another fact that supports the multidisciplinary approach necessary for landscape resilience is the nature of the 120 practices detailed in the good practice factsheets. According to their authors, when classifying each of the practices, 35 correspond to more than one type of solution (governance, financial, managerial or technological), 48 relate to more than one sector (forestry, agriculture or agroforestry) and 74, more than half, are practices that tackle more than one type of disturbance (wildfires, drought, desertification, floods, pests & diseases).
For this reason, it makes perfect sense to have created a MOOC, “Resilience for Mediterranean Landscapes”, which covers both the agricultural and forestry sectors and encourages agronomists to discover the challenges and solutions of the forestry sector and vice versa. A list of forty policy recommendations has also been drawn up, classified according to four challenges: integrating the resilient landscapes framework into all areas of sectoral policies, promoting sustainable management of cultural landscapes and nature-based solutions, combining traditional knowledge and innovation, and promoting public-social-private policies and partnerships for financing resilience. This classification has been made taking into account that many of the recommendations are cross-cutting and do not apply to a specific sector alone.
Throughout the three years of the ResAlliance project, we have collaborated with other projects to reach a wider audience. The last joint action was the end-of-project conference, which was held together with the FOREST4EU project in Croatia, a country where we had not previously had a presence! At the conference, good practices and innovations were presented without distinguishing which project they came from, since, at the end of the day, what matters most to the public is that the content is relevant and of high quality. At the same event, a round table discussion between project coordinators debated numerous recommendations for promoting collaboration between projects.
The ResAlliance website will continue to exist, albeit archived, until November 2028. Although it will eventually disappear due to lack of resources, all the material produced by ResAlliance will remain stored and accessible in the long term on the EU-FarmBook platform. We hope to continue to energise and expand a community interested in landscape resilience on this platform. There is still a long way to go!
This article was originally written by:
Eduard Mauri, ResAlliance project coordinator (European Forest Institute – EFI)
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