you are not logged in
Combating desertification in Mediterranean Europe : linking science with stakeholders
DESERTLINKS is a European, international and interdisciplinary research
project funded by the European Commission under Framework Programme 5.
DESERTLINKS involves eleven research groups from universities and institutes
in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands and the United
Kingdom.
This project comes at a time when political and scientific initiatives on
European desertification are moving in a parallel direction. The UNCCD have
developed a strategy for combating desertification that requires affected
countries to develop monitoring techniques and national and regional action
programmes involving stakeholders. Desertification indicators have been
identified as a potentially useful tool for both management and monitoring,
and the Northern Mediterranean countries are searching for a common
methodology for identifying and using such indicators.
Valuable and useful results, knowledge and expertise, including proto-type
indicator systems at different scales, have been obtained from previous
research into land degradation and desertification in Mediterranean Europe.
This will be combined with new kinds of indicators, identified by the local
stakeholders in a number of desertification-affected areas. The resulting
indicator system will be a significant contribution to the work of the
UNCCD, and in particular the Northern Mediterranean countries.
| Project number | EVK2-CT-2001-00109 | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Subject(s) | no translation available , no translation available , no translation available , no translation available | ||
| Acronym | DESERTLINKS | ||
| Geographical coverage | United Kingdom,Portugal,Greece,Italy,Spain,Netherlands, | ||
| Budget (in €) | 0 | ||
| Programme | FP5 EESD | ||
| Web site | http://www.kcl.ac.uk/projects/desertlinks/ | ||
| Objectives | DESERTLINKS will support stakeholders at the local, sub-national and national level in combating desertification. It will bring the results of past research on the physical and socio-economic aspects of desertification to bear on practical ways to combat it at various geographical scales from the local to the European.DESERTLINKS will provide indicators to monitor desertification as well as syntheses of the understanding of the physical and socio-economic processes that cause it. It will establish the ways in which major current Mediterranean-wideband uses are affecting desertification. It will show how to mitigate its effects by taking different land management decisions at both the public policy and individual level and by adopting practical land management techniques. |
||
| Results | DIS4ME: Desertification Indicators System for Mediterranean Europe The desertification indicators system for Mediterranean Europe has been developed by the DESERTLINKS project. It gives access to around 150 indicators of relevance to Mediterranean desertification. It has been designed to provide a tool to enable users from a wide range of backgrounds (including scientists, policymakers and farmers) to:
The work is scheduled for completion by the end of March 2005, and until then it should be treated as a prototype, subject to continued development and improvement. However, already around 100 indicators have been fully described, their use at local and regional scales has been demonstrated, and tools to calculate composite indices of desertification status and risk have been completed. You are welcome to access the indicator system and give us your comments and feedback. To obtain the necessary password, please contact us by email. |
||
| Period | [01/12/2001 - 31/03/2005] | ||
