Marginal in the Maghreb and even more globally, camel breeding systems remain important in desert areas not only from cultural and identity perspectives but also as important economic asset. Moroccan and Algerian Sahara provinces have economic and social interests to develop these systems since this activity is likely to supply local products with a high food value and a potential value-added for the southern areas in the major consumption basins of Northern cities. The camel sector is fully in line with the territorial and economic duality, thus contributing to the reduction of observed inequalities. In this context, CAMEL-SHIELD aims at providing management solutions adapted to local conditions to improve the adaptability of livestock systems to climate change. These solutions take into account access to resources, breeding and feeding management strategies based on available resources, herd needs and characterization of camel populations, in order to manage herd demographics and to adapt products to marketing potential. The project contributes to the valorisation of traditional and new camel products insuring food and nutrition security and opens up opportunities for the valorisation of by-products. In addition, as part of an economic globalization, the project will allow an acceleration of the local, regional or international market access for products hitherto limited to their production area by the identity dimension of products with an emotional and symbolic pre-eminence. The project proposes an inter-institutional cooperation, involving development partners, academics and different stakeholders of the whole camel sector, through an interdisciplinary approach by mobilizing expertise, skills and competences. This project gives priority to the expression of the needs of the actors and the search for cultural value shared, by the promotion of values associated with camel breeding and its production.

In the Mediterranean, freshwater availability is put under increasing pressure by global warming, land use changes, and water abstraction. Moreover, deteriorating water and soil quality put agricultural productivity and safe water supply for the population at further risk and urgently demand sustainable solutions. PureCircles wants to realize such solutions at four Mediterranean study sites (2 in Europe and 2 in the Maghreb) by integrating water technology with agrotechnical setups and management strategies. For the first time, we will demonstrate the power and effectiveness of a combination of agrophotovoltaics, hydroponics, smart irrigation and innovative water storage and treatment technology, all of which are intelligently linked and regulated through Artificial Intelligence (AI). Sophisticated, but robust technology (e.g., flexible greenhouse photovoltaics (PV), water-harvesting field PV-arrays, energy-efficient RO/NF treatment, AI-assisted farm management) will meet nature-based and sustainable water treatment solutions (hydroponics, microbial bioremediation) and shall be assembled and activated dependent on need and framing conditions (financial resources, availability and quality of water, crop choice, weather forecast, etc.). The work plan proposed will provide and validate concepts and tools to buffer water availability between extreme weather events, reduce the net water extraction, unburden natural water bodies from nitrates, pesticides, salts and other pollutants, and at the same time, advance agroecological production sustainability. Our multidisciplinary consortium of academic, management and industry partners brings together long-standing scientific expertise and broad experience from other projects. Building up on this and being reinforced by a reliable network of stakeholders, we want to develop site-specific solutions that are sustainable beyond the project duration. For this, all study sites will adopt the “Living Lab” approach, which is crucial for stakeholder-centered innovation, co-creation, sustainable implementation and long-lasting success beyond project duration. We will encourage entrepreneurial spirit and establish co-creation spaces (virtual and real ones) to motivate all stakeholders to get involved actively. Special emphasis will be put on the integration of the young generation and local women, which will be aided by our existing connections to women entrepreneurial initiatives in the Maghreb region and innovation networks in Europe. To aid widespread implementation, technical developments and tailoring will be discussed and optimized together with our expert stakeholders. Moreover, all solutions developed (and their systemic combinations) will be evaluated by life cycle (LCA) and sustainability analyses, as well as with regard to socioeconomic implications and cost-benefit ratios. Finally, modelling and decision support tools for the catchment areas of our study sites will be developed to validate the envisaged effects of the PureCircles concept with regard to water pollution, salinization, and availability. Our study sites and technical solutions shall become reference sites for the Mediterranean region and respective KPI, recommendations and best practice examples widely adopted by farmer cooperatives and regulating-authorities on municipal, regional and national level to leverage the great potential of the concept proposed. As reliable partners for political and societal stakeholders we will support the implementation of National and European Action plans and pave the way for a more sustainable and competitive agriculture in marginal Mediterranean regions.

The Mediterranean basin has been facing the challenge of increasing temperatures and drought due to climate change for several years. This situation threatens the availability of feed resources, the sustainability of grazing livestock and the livelihood of rural communities, particularly those living in marginal rural areas. Given the economic importance of livestock in the Mediterranean, if these effects persist as predicted by the IPCC scenarios (https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/), they will disrupt food security in this area and jeopardize small-scale traditional livestock systems that do not have the basic infrastructure necessary for efficient livestock management, nor the early warning systems to address the problem well in advance. According to recent studies, the goat has been shown to provide the solution to face these environmental challenges in the Mediterranean. Is evident that the goat, is ideal due to its resilience and high tolerance to heat and drought, its ability to survive on poor pastures and its high resistance to diseases, thus providing a source of animal proteins (meat and milk) to reduce human malnutrition in marginal areas where other livestock systems are not feasible, and to face climate changes and support agro-pastoral society. In addition, there are advantages associated with consuming goat meat and milk (low-fat content, healthy fatty acids profile, better tolerance and digestibility), so it could be part of the solution to reduce metabolic diseases. Based on these findings, the objectives of the MEDGOAT project are to support viable agro-pastoral agriculture and rational use of agro-pastoral lands by a) strengthening the knowledge of local goat breeds for their climate resilience and promoting the use of these specific breeds in the Mediterranean region b) assessing the potential of local goat breeds, in a perspective of potentiating biodiversity, exploiting their resistance to the effects of climate change, and improving animal management systems (especially feeding practices) to face climate challenges and reduce the water footprint of goat farming, in a circular bioeconomy approach. c) evaluating the impact of the contribution of non-conventional feed resources (e.g., cactus, olive and date co-products), non-protein nitrogen sources (e.g., urea and nitrate) and local plants that can be valorized on both the environmental impact of farming systems and the productivity of the goat and its health. The trials will also make it possible to characterize the quality of milk and meat and develop innovations for their storage. MEDGOAT implements an interconnected multidisciplinary approach that brings together academic and non-academic actors, including breeders and industrialists (13 partners), from six countries (France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Tunisia and Morocco) and that covers several disciplines:breeding, nutrition, animal and human health, animal welfare, sociology and economics. With the technical support of one of the world's leading goat experts (ICAR-National Institute of Animal Nutrition and Physiology in Bangalore, India), this project will involve a technological and organizational model of multi-stakeholder collaboration for sustainable goat production to ensure food security and sustainability in the Mediterranean regions. MEDGOAT responds to FAO recommendations by aiming to ensure the livelihood security of farmers in rural areas, especially women, the primary holders of small ruminants in the Mediterranean regions.

The focus of the ANR proposal is to launch a network joining European and non-European teams working on local development in the highlands, in order to submit a proposal to RISE (Research and Innovation Staff Exchange) Marie Curie Program/H2020 early 2017. The objectives of the RISE proposal will be (i) share and debate the diverse initiatives and innovations of local development in the highlands, (ii) develop specific capacity building focused on different types of stakeholders and local people, (iii) participate in policymaking through relevant suggestions, monitoring and assessment of actions and (iv) strengthen a recognized European competence on the local development in the highlands. The partnership for the ANR proposal, and consequently for the RISE proposal, is based four countries of European Union (Austria, France, Portugal and United Kingdom), two other European countries (Norway and Switzerland) and non-European countries in Mediterranean (Morocco and Lebanon), the Americas (Argentina, Canada, Equator, Peru, the United States) and Eastern Asia (China and Vietnam). Research question is adaptation process and resilience of high mountain societies to global change, especially initiatives and innovations focused on local development. Several initiatives of local development in the highlands were implemented in the countries of the European Union, although the concepts have sometimes been built in other areas, as for example natural parks, reserves of biodiversity, reserves of biosphere, “regional” parks, winter and summer slow tourism, many small agribusiness factories for cheeses, liquors, fruits, etc. Diverse reasons justified these implementations in the European Union, especially the specific policies made at national and European level, which strongly incentivized and supported these initiatives, in order to reduce the disadvantages of these regions, mainly due to their weak access and their long distance to decisions centers. Indeed, focused on the sustainable development, the specific national and European policies significantly impacted local development in European highlands, compared with non-European highlands where economic issues and national interest usually lead their development, especially in developing countries. Moreover, the supportive context for local development initiatives lead to new initiatives and also innovations focused on the improvement of these initiatives and the building of new initiatives, including in policymaking. In other words, based on the European Union experience, the implementation of local development could lead to new steps of local development. It is a research hypothesis to be verified in European Union and tested in the other zones. A priori, for the method of the RISE proposal, we suggest using the concept of co-viability, which includes both viability and its regulation, to analyze resilience factors at different scales, representations and local knowledge, access to resources and policymaking in global change context. This point has to be debate with the partner in the next months. In terms of activity to be developed in 2016 in order to build the RISE proposal, firstly there are five visits to each of the European partners in order to better share the common objectives of the RISE proposal, select the local development initiatives for the compare analysis and draft a concept note of the RISE proposal. Secondly, a workshop joining the leaders of European partners with 3-4 leaders of non-European teams will allow to better define the contents of the proposal and to draft a first version.

In a context of climate, socio-economic, policy and institutional changes, the Mediterranean region (MR) needs to strengthen its food and nutrition security, while improving its natural resource management. The major challenges are therefore: i) making agricultural food production systems highly resilient to water shortage and climate and market shocks; ii) combining food production and provision of ecosystem services in a “sustainable intensification” of farming systems to meet the ever growing food demand; iii) sustaining rural populations, ensuring farming profitability and employment and iv) providing rural and urban consumers with safe and nutritious, culturally acceptable and economically accessible food. Using the multi-scale and multidomain Integrated Assessment of Agricultural Systems (IAAS) approach, the SEMIARID project aims at assessing the resilience of Mediterranean farming systems in relation with their crop diversity, water management, farm structure and food production strategy, in order to evaluate whether they can maintain high productivity and provision of ecosystem services in the face of possible climate and socio-economic changes/shocks. The combination of biophysical and household bio-economic models will allow capturing both production and consumption decisions of farming households and environmental facets of farming activity and to identify levers of action to improve these performances. Combining model insights and local stakeholder collaboration, scenarios will be designed for resilience simulation and trade-off analysis to test scientific hypothesis and for strategic thinking with stakeholders. On the basis of representative household farm types in three contrasting case studies in Morocco, Algeria and France, original knowledge and innovative methodological tools will be developed in three fields. 1. The exploration of the role of intra-farm and inter-farm diversity in determining the resilience and adaptability of Mediterranean agricultural systems. Overall, the question addresses the assessment of the resilience of Mediterranean farming systems to global change (climate, socio-economic) and how it is affected by diversity in cropping systems (annual vs. perennial ; succession vs. association), water management (rain-fed, irrigated), farm structure (size, number and nature of activities, availability of irrigation, etc.), local resource availability (water, labour, land) and access to facilities (technical supports, market, etc.). 2. The implementation of a modelling framework for integrated impact assessment to explore how different scenarios of diversity and adaptiveness developed in interaction with local stakeholders, might improve the resilience of Mediterranean farming systems to reduced water availability and quality in a context of global change. 3. The emergence of a multidisciplinary group of Mediterranean researchers and students supported by an international course on integrated modelling for resilience assessment and integrated impact analysis, using the Case Studies as illustration.