Mediterranean Biodiversity Protection Community (MBPC) – Mainstreaming biodiversity management efforts for environmental sustainability.

Description

The Mediterranean Biodiversity Protection Community (MBPC) is a horizontal Interreg Med project focusing on maintaining biodiversity and natural ecosystems through strengthening the management and networking of protected areas. The MBPC builds on the efforts of previous InterregMed PANACeA during the period 2016-2019 in assisting and ensuring synergies between the community of thematic projects of Biodiversity protection as well as in acting as a Science-Policy-Interface to foster the exchange of experiences and knowledge sharing to influence a behavioural and policy change.

Challenges like climate change and human-driven pressures on the environment require improved protection measures and cooperation among stakeholders to ensure the resilience of coastal areas, biodiversity and natural-cultural heritage, as well as, the sustainability of ecosystem services. Thus, the MBPC activities aim at strengthening management of and cooperation among protected areas and ecoregions. It also seeks to influence the dialogue science-management-policy as tools to increase capacities for nature conservation and monitoring.

The MBPC serve as multiple interfaces for different stakeholders and previous and ongoing Interreg Med modular projects to streamline mechanisms to improve networking and management efforts in protected areas and critical ecoregions. To achieve these goals, the MBPC project will:

1) Develop a common understanding of the situation of biodiversity protection in the Mediterranean through a structured synthesis and peer-review process by academic partners and experts, to provide harmonised, high-quality outputs to be disseminated to and capitalised by stakeholder groups.

2) Develop the MBP Community through activities including working groups with modular projects, the MED programme, and other relevant stakeholders ensuring transfer and capitalisation of knowledge generated beyond the project’s lifetime and at the transboundary level.

3) Implement an improved communication strategy to disseminate results on biodiversity management and protection towards protected areas networks and ecoregional approaches for adequate protection. Different target audiences (e.g. Protected areas managers, policy-makers) are addressed with tailor-made communication tools.

4) The MBPC innovative approach relies on preparing relevant contents and dissemination through tailored workshops and the long-term capitalisation tool to enable evidence-based policy implementation at different geographical scales. The open-source Biodiversity Knowledge Platform will seek synergies with the Interreg MED web portal ensuring both wide dissemination of and easy access to the spatial knowledge.

MEDCITIES, as an expert of capitalisation processes, is in charge of the communication strategy, by setting up ways for knowledge sharing and reinforced evidence-based communication. Leading this process implies being in charge of the communication strategy of the project, produce and update communication materials, developing communication campaigns and so forth. MedCities is further engaged in all project components and, especially, co-leading the Working Group 1 on Biodiversity protection and transboundary challenges.

The city of Marseille – member of MedCities network – is one of our associated partners.

General Objective

The MBPC general objective is to facilitate multisectoral dialogue with the scientific community to ensure an effective policy-management-science interface in the Mediterranean related to biodiversity protection and sustainable development.

Specific Objective

To maintain biodiversity and natural ecosystems through strengthening the management and networking of protected areas.

For more information visit the project website: https://biodiversity-protection.interreg-med.eu/