Hello fellow IVY adventurers,
My name is Alexis, 26 years old and I am currently an IVY Partner for the Interreg Euro-MED project Wetland4Change. Hosted by the Tour du Valat, in the heart of the Camargue and the Rhône delta in southern France, one of the biggest river deltas of the Mediterranean region. The Tour du Valat is a research institute specialized in wetlands monitoring, preservation and restoration in the Mediterranean region. It has only been almost two months since I started this volunteering program and I still have more to explore, yet I am excited to share with you a part of this amazing so-far experience.
The Project
The Interreg Euro-MED – Wetland4Change project connects 5 Mediterranean countries (Spain, France, Italy, Bulgaria and my country of origin, Greece) in order to validate solutions based on wetland conservation and restoration for a better climate change adaptation and mitigation.
Each of the 6 international partner organizations has a specific task. The Tour du Valat, in instance, is in charge of the second out of the three main work packages of the Wetland4Change program which consists of the assessment of each pilot site’s potential to regulate floods and the zones in risk. It is one of the two natural environmental services (ES) of wetlands that are studied through this program. The second service studied is the potential of wetlands to sequestrate, or in other words to capture carbon. Wetlands are much more efficient on capturing and stocking atmospheric carbon emissions than forests and so they can naturally serve as a great solution to mitigate climate change in the Mediterranean zone.
The tools created by this project will then be transferred to policymakers in the Euro-Med region in order to address the climate crisis at both local and territorial levels. A transfer plan is going to be created in order to make these science-based tools more accessible to the users, which could be farmers, school teachers, scientists, environmental activists, regional policymakers or even just tourists. I do personally believe that everyone can benefit from this and similar projects, as wetlands are linked to various domains, such as agriculture, animal greasing, tourism, biodiversity and can generally be linked to better, as in healthier, life conditions.
My role as IVY Project Partner
As an IVY Project Partner hosted by the Tour du Valat, I am supporting their work in the second Work Package of the Wetland4Change project, which implies the creation of maps assessing the potential of each pilot site to regulate floods. There is a focus in areas where land use, vegetation cover or population distribution could be useful to better manage or restore and the methodology will be applied for all 5 pilot sites studied, so regular communication with all the partners is necessary. A part of my work is also to apply the Transfer Plans through the Tour du Valat organization and their local stakeholder partners. In September I will be organizing, with the help of my mentor and his team an event for the local partners, in order to exchange all the information and data collected through this project and better evaluate all together the preservation and restoration plans and laws that might have to be put in order to better adapt these regions to climate change.
Wetland4Change Living Lab in Sardinia, Italy
Last month, the 13th and 14th of May, the first Living Lab of Wetland4Change took place in Italy between Cagliari and Marceddì in Sardinia, organized by the Italian project partner MedSea. I had the honour to participate in this initiative as an IVY Project Partner and of course also representing the Tour du Valat, along with my mentor. It was a really interesting and productive opportunity for me to meet all the partners, discuss the next steps to follow around each specific study site and especially get to know and exchange with stakeholders and policymakers from all partner countries, including mayors, ONGs and even ministry representatives.
A struggle specific to the scientific community that was treated during this workshop and which happens also to be a field I want to follow professionally is science dissemination and public awareness. All participants agreed that it is really important that the science-based tools produced through this project should be accessible to all stakeholders, policymakers and communities but also have to be user-friendly, especially when the subject is not something easy to visualize or to empathize with.
To finish with, I would like to add that I know already that in the Tour du Valat, where I happen to do my volunteering program through the Interreg Volunteer Youth Initiative, being surrounded by passionate researchers, nature lovers and birdwatching enthusiasts, I will also get to grow in this community and have a really valuable experience here.
Being part of such projects rooting for environmental restoration, biodiversity preservation and a better future adapted to climate change is one of my long-term life aspirations and is something I will definitely be looking up to even after this volunteering finishes.
– Alexis, IVY Project Partner at Tour du Valat Foundation, for the Interreg project Wetland4Change, under the programme Interreg Euro – MED.
