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, 29th and 30th 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, 1st 2010
to December, 31th 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.
related links and downloads:
- presentation "F:ACTS: Pilot project in Monte do Carrio area (Spain)" [PDF, ~2.3 MB]
- F:ACTS! Handbook: http://goo.gl/92IIU