The Interreg Community for the Protection of Biodiversity in the Mediterranean (MBPC) organized its three-day interactive final event entitled: “The Mediterranean leading the way : A cooperative framework to strengthen area-based nature conservation actions” to share the results of several years of work including tools, experiences, lessons learnt and best practices from the community that will contribute to regional biodiversity conservation and climate agendas’ goals.
The agenda included interactive networking and official acts involving biodiversity managers, territorial planners, decision makers and researchers and representatives from biodiversity- and climate-related sectoral organisations, across local and regional scales and all those people and organisations interested in biodiversity protection and sustainable natural resource management in the Mediterranean region.
The objective of this final event, counting on decision-makers and regional actors as target audience, was to address biodiversity-related policy needs to effectively address biodiversity related management and induce transformative change through a guided tour on effective tested tools, solutions, and experiences in hand.
The MBPC published the Policy Paper: Towards a Nature Positive Mediterranean: Accelerating the transition for the conservation, restoration and wise use of biodiversity in the Mediterranean and its policy brief to mobilise transformational change and reverse the catastrophic biodiversity loss and climate change impacts we are currently witnessing in the Mediterranean.
The MBPC also presented theEcosystem Restoration Best Practices Catalogue for the Mediterranean during an interactive session. This catalogue aims to address the urgent need to identify and disseminate nature-based solutions, provide transferable best practices for broader ecosystem restoration actions during the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (UN/FAO), and contribute at the regional level to the effort led by the FAO-led Best Practices Working Group in charge of supporting the implementation of the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.
About 90 in person participants and 50 participants online joined during those three days. Many sessions took place, from highlighting the importance of Nature-based solutions as an answer to the biodiversity and climate crisis in the Mediterranean region, balancing sectoral activities and ecosystem integrity, best practices in upscaling nature restoration measures such as rewilding, restoring artificial areas, or removing pollution to allow nature to recover in the Mediterranean, to the review of marine and maritime EU policies regarding area-based nature conservation actions. A final report with a summary of the event will be published soon.
