:: The Land Laboratory participates in the conference "Resilient areas: connecting climate change to peri-urban and rural development", of the F:ACTS! project | Laboratorio do Territorio (LaboraTe), Universidad de Santiago de Compostela ::

The Land Laboratory participates in the conference "Resilient areas: connecting climate change to peri-urban and rural development", of the F:ACTS! project

Submitted by laborate on Wed, 05/12/2012 - 12:58 GMT.

The final conference of the project Forms for: Adapting to Climate Change through Territorial Strategies! (F:ACTS) entitled "Resilient areas: connecting climate change to peri-urban and rural development", took place on November, 29^th and 30^th in Brussels (Belgium).

The Galician Ministry of Rural Affairs and the Land Laboratory (LaboraTe), from the USC, participated in the conference, which was intended to spread the activities carried out throughout the project and the gotten results. The F:ACTS! project is part of an INTERREG IVC programme and among its partners there were 14 institutions from 8 European countries.

During the three years - from January, 1^st 2010 to December, 31^th 2012 - this project lasted, the backbone of the developed work has been the exchange of knowledge and experiences through meetings, internships, workshops and coaching visits where partners, main actors and local institutions participated to share the experiencea learnt in five pilot projects: Monte Carrio (Galicia, Spain), Strofylia (Western Greece), De Wijers (Limburg, Belgium), Baixo Vouga Lagoon (Aveiro, Portugal) and Varna (Severoiztochen, Bulgary). All these pilot areas are facing risks like droughts, floods or forest fires.

Integrated Territorial Strategies (ITS) were proposed as a means for territorial development according to specific economic, environmental and social needs of each pilot areas. ITS were presented at the first day of the dissemination event.

Moreover, the global conclusions and the good practices identified during the project will be shared, so that they can be implemented all over European territories facing similar problems. All this knowledge was included in a handbook entitled "Forms of Climate Change Adaptation through Integrated Territorial Strategies: The Handbook", which was presented in the last conference day.

The principles of cooperation, participation and stakeholder involvement which were dormant throughout the experience, were also present at the Final Conference through round tables where experts, policy makers and students from different countries discussed these concepts and gathered some insights on them.

The conference was closed by José Manuel Silva Rodríguez, Director-General of the of European Union Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development. He highlighted that the results of F:ACTS! are closely related to the new Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) given the high degree of dependency that agricultural production on climate and the importance of agriculture in local and regional economic and ecological balance. He also identified the results as part of one of the CAP main strategies; namely, encourage research and development to achieve innovation and enable the adaptation of general and sectoral policies to territorial particularities.