News

MEDSEA foundation, which has been carrying out the Maristanis project in the Oristano area in Sardinia since 2017, attended last week the yearly meeting of the MAVA steering committee. The session took place from 16 to 17 December 2021 in Châteauneuf-le-Rouge, in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region, and gathered together the international partners of the M3 strategy which aims to improve the conservation of the coastal wetlands.  

A two-day seminar to look at figures, goals and future of the projects on wetlands reached over the last year within the Mediterranean Region and to evaluate the activities developed within the Maristanis project in Sardinia. Maristanis officially entered its last year of project with a full focus in finding together with the local institutions and communities of the 11 municipalities a common management model of wetlands, through the ongoing participatory process. To ensure that conservation, restoration and sustainable development activities can be carried on also in the future. 

The results achieved in Sardinia have received unanimous appreciation, from precision agriculture that led to an innovative model of sustainable management of water resources among the Oristano farms, to the ongoing participatory process meetings with local enterprises and communities to decide the wetland governance model for the territory, also consisting in the six Ramsar wetlands sites. 

The adopted solutions in Sardinia can also be replicated on a large scale – the MAVA Steering committee considered - such as the restoration project in the Marceddì and San Giovanni lagoon, one of the rare examples of Nature based Solution *, a model for the Mediterranean. During the meeting, some of the results on the evaluation of ecosystem services, carried out by MEDSEA by applying the TESSA methodology developed by BirdLife, to the S'Ena Arrubia area were also presented. Furthermore, the mapping of the climate risk in the Mediterranean coasts was presented, edited by the experts of the MEDSEA foundation within the projects developed by BirdLife International within the M3 strategy. In particular the mapping produced by the MEDSEA researchers highlights the coastal wetlands that are located in areas where there is a higher climatic risk. 

* NbS = nature-based solutions. This is an approach by which environmental problems are treated not through traditional infrastructural interventions but through actions that aim to increase the resilience of ecosystems and their ability to offer ecosystem services. To achieve these results, the aim is to restore ecosystems or to introduce technological and infrastructural systems that mimic the capabilities of ecosystems. To be clearer: instead of building a dam to handle sea level rise (as commonly carried out in the Netherlands in the last century), a nature based solution such coastal lagoons that absorb sea level rise can be restored or created.