Results

FASTER will deliver easily accessible practice-oriented knowledge on land and water management towards adaptation to climate change through FAS services, available in the long term, which will increase the flow of practical information between similar geographical areas in the Maghreb. This will contribute to the visibility and recognition of researchers’ work on the subject, also outside the scientific community. However, more importantly, the support of FASTER to land and water management and especially the establishment of a living lab as incubator of operating FAS initiatives, translated into an increase of adaptation practices use across Tunisia, may provide substantial environmental and socioeconomic impacts in the long term and a broader scale:

  • The project will help bridging the gap between research and innovation by improving performance in managing, transferring and using the knowledge resulting from land and water adaptive management and by better aligning both research and economic objectives to societal needs.
  • The environmental benefits of land and water management approaches in view of climate change described in the overall concept of the project are not only a potential extra value, but one of the principal ways to sustain nature in the face of unprecedented global change.
  • Improved linkages between researchers, technicians and farmers, favoured by FAS approaches, will encounter spatial and temporal variations in production due to climate change; By involving technicians in the project, FASTER will help to connect them to EU policy and research development. This will improve coordination between the policy level and the main developers of management technologies on eco-innovation, avoiding duplication of research efforts and facilitating market uptake of available technologies.
  • Facilitating administrative FAS could in turn be translated into greater support of government bodies from these farmers by, for example, introducing payments for ecosystem services schemes and providing necessary community services to rural areas.
  • The former will also directly support the attraction of young people and women to the sector, both through economic incentives and services such as childcare, transport, healthcare, and education, providing job opportunities and freeing up time from care duties. Young people and women may then bring a set of new skills to the sector such as an improved ability to communicate, to work in teams, to resolve conflicts and to explore new business possibilities.
  • Potential new markets for alternative products will be supported by FAS initiatives, giving voice to adaptive management producers of marginal agricultural and non-wood forest goods.