Landscape resilience is crucial for forests and farms in the Mediterranean basin, a region particularly susceptible to the impacts of climate change. Extreme weather events such as droughts and floods, as well as related disturbances such as wildfires, are becoming more frequent and intense. These events threaten the sustainability of the region and the livelihoods of local populations. Strengthening landscape resilience enables us to prepare for and respond to these challenges more effectively, thereby ensuring the sustainability of ecosystems and human activities.
Sharing good practices across borders
Although good practices on landscape resilience exist, they are not necessarily disseminated across borders. Language barriers and the absence of a mandate for international dissemination by the entities developing these practices are among the main causes of poor dissemination of practical knowledge.
Faced with these challenges, how can we leverage the practical knowledge developed by others? Where can we find it? In other words: how can we avoid reinventing the wheel?
The ResAlliance consortium is working to overcome these challenges. Present in seven Mediterranean countries (Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Cyprus, Lebanon and Tunisia), ResAlliance has collected 120 good practices on landscape resilience that are not widely known outside their countries of origin. These practices have been described in two- and four-page factsheets and are available in six languages: English, French, Greek, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.
Users can filter this collection with four different parameters:
- Sector of activity: agricultural, forestry, or agroforestry.
- Type of solution: financial, governance, managerial, or technological.
- Climate hazard: desertification, drought, flooding, pests and diseases, or wildfires.
- Implementing actors: individual farmers or foresters, associations of farmers or foresters, broader communities, or practices that require the involvement of policymakers.
Readers can also search for practices using the text search function.
Extra tools to build knowledge
ResAlliance also provides a variety of additional resources to help farmers, foresters, and land managers expand their knowledge and improve their skills. These include:
- 27 practices presented directly by their creators in short videos or written narratives.
- A massive open online course (MOOC) that provides the latest knowledge on the impact of climate hazards on Mediterranean farms and forests and explores cutting-edge solutions with real-world case studies from Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece, Tunisia and Cyprus. The MOOC is available in English, French, Greek, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.
- A dedicated forum to discuss topics of interest with a pan-Mediterranean community (in English) or with your local community in your local language.
Eduard Mauri, coordinator of the ResAlliance project, emphasises its unique characteristics: “ResAlliance is one of the few thematic networks that brings together farmers and foresters, because the resilience of our landscapes does not stop at the edge of the forest or at the hedgerow of our fields.”
A unique network backed by EU-FarmBook
The collection of 120 factsheets in six languages is stored on the EU-FarmBook platform, developed by the eponymous Horizon Europe project. It offers free, long-term hosting of practice-oriented farming and forestry materials, richly annotated with metadata, and respecting the Open Access and FAIR principles. EU-FarmBook content benefits from state-of-the-art IT features (some under development), such as an AI-powered search engine and a trustworthy chatbot that generates responses based solely on the content available in EU-FarmBook. With automatic translation, the content can be accessed into all EU official languages.
About ResAlliance
ResAlliance (complete project name “Landscape resilience knowledge alliance for agriculture and forestry in the Mediterranean basin”) is a Horizon Europe-funded thematic network. Its aim is to provide foresters and farmers with the knowledge and tools necessary to implement innovative solutions to make landscapes more resilient. With a focus on Mediterranean countries, ResAlliance identifies knowledge gaps and barriers and gathers good practices to promote resilient landscapes, paying particular attention to measures against hazards influenced by climate change.
The network has over 2,000 members across the Mediterranean who engage in online activities, while individuals and organisations from northern Portugal, Catalonia (Spain), Sardinia (Italy), the Peloponnese (Greece) and Cyprus can participate in regional in-person knowledge transfer sessions. ResAlliance also has two focal points, in Lebanon and Tunisia.
Contact information
Eduard Mauri, ResAlliance project coordinator, eduard.mauri@efi.int (European Forest Institute)
