Past and on-going projects
Mação Municipality is one of the four Portuguese UNCCD pilot areas, where the main aim is to establish strategies and actions to fight desertification and to make Mação an example of good practice at local, national and even supranational level.
Owing to the poor environmental and socio-economic contexts, the Mação area was selected as a study area in 1992 for the IBERLIM Project (EV5V-0041 - 'Land management practice and erosion limitation in contrasting wildfire and gullied locations in the Iberian Peninsula' (1992-1994)') in which the impacts of forest fires and afforestation practices were assessed. For the same reasons it was also selected for study in later projects, as detailed below.
The MEDCHANGE Project (ERB-IC18-CT97-0147 - 'Effects of land use and land management practices changes on land degradation under forest and grazing ecosystems' (1997-2000)) and the MEDAFOR Project (ENV4-CT97-0686 - 'Consequences for the mitigation of desertification of EU policies affecting forestry activity: a combined socio-economic and physical environmental approach' (1998-2001)) allowed a deeper insight into degradation processes. The absence of good integration of end-users within these projects limited the transfer of knowledge from the research to the operational level.
The Mação area was also one of the study areas under the CLIMED Project (ICA3-2000-30005 - 'Effects of climate change and climate variability in water availability and water management practices in Western Mediterranean' (2001-2004)) in which flood risk and drought strategies were evaluated, with special emphasis on the readiness of local communities to face global change challenges.
FIREGUARD Project (QLK5-CT-2001-00784 - 'Monitoring Forests at the Management Unit Level for Fire Prevention and Control' (2002-2005)).
MacFire - Solution adapted from Track Tool - Fire system, specifically designed to fire fighting and prevention by PLogP with the collaboration of Mação Council.
These studies have revealed how unprepared local communities are to face the challenges that global change will pose for natural resource management and the restricted choices. These earlier studies have so far lacked the overall perspective needed of a wide range of experiences so that alternative feasible sustainable solutions can assessed. Furthermore, the participatory dimension of DESIRE is expected to produce more profound impacts than previous projects, where the effective participation of the key actors and stakeholders was not achieved.
