Learning about Biosphere Reserves is equivalent thus to learn about matters of sustainability: environmental protection, territorial management, sustainable development.
Understanding a Biosphere Reserve is to understand issues in socio-ecological studies.
Managing a Biosphere Reserve requires a particular set of soft and hard skills.
Besides being an object of study, Biosphere Reserves are also tools for learning, ‘living laboratories’. That is why learning should be context-based, exploiting the territory as a teaching environment.
This can be defined as the Leitmotiv of the Edu-BioMed project, in which UNIMED is a partner. The project, which has just finished, has worked to strengthen, foster and upgrade academic activity at four Moroccan and Lebanese universities in the context of Mediterranean Biosphere Reserves.
To continue what has been started within the project, the partnership has launched a Manifesto for an alliance among Universities and BRs and wants to invite all to endorse it! Follow this link to sign it.
Project’s Highlights and results
To achieve its objective the Edu-BioMed project’s partners have worked on a baseline for University curricula development in and around the topic of Biosphere Reserve.
Furthermore, working in collaboration with University professors, researchers and Biosphere Reserve managers, they have developed an online course, openly available in English and in French and focused on promoting education and applied research in Mediterranean Biosphere Reserves.
To increase the collaboration among Universities and Biosphere Reserves, and to involve the citizens in this topic, the project has produced a phone app for citizen science and a database for collaborative research.
The collaboration has also conducted to the pubblication of an eBook that counts the contribution of 50 authors and that has the particularity of being resolutely part of the cross dynamics of Mediterranean Biosphere Reserves. It is enriched by the points of view of actors in the field and Lebanese, Tunisian, Moroccan, French and Catalan academics.
Due to the nature of this project and the collaboration among Academia and BRs, the Edu-BioMed partners have also produced Recommendations for policy makers providing an assessment about gaps, inertias and opportunities at the level of legal frameworks and governance mechanisms that influence Biosphere Reserves management and reality in Lebanon, Morocco, France and Spain.
Among all these activities, the project has managed to mobilize more than 100 people from more than 15 different departments and research centres to perform more than 35 research and education projects in and with four Lebanese and Moroccan Biosphere Reserves, together with their management staff.
Here you can download this infographics and here the poster with all the project’s highlights
More information on the Edu-BioMed project is available on the project website.