by Sherman Farhad (University of Córdoba)
On 13-15 October 2021, the MOVING partner Sherman Farhad participated at the Forum ‘Origin, Diversity and Territories’, which this year focusses on disruption and rebounds of territorialised food systems.
Sherman works as scientific coordinator at the University of Cordoba (Spain), which is leading this Horizon 2020 project, and during the forum she had the opportunity to publicise the project by participating in a panel discussion where she answers a number of questions:
From your experience, can you illustrate the usefulness of networks for mountain areas?
MOVING aims to develop new or improved value chains to contribute to the resilience and sustainability of mountain areas in the face of climate change and social change. Furthermore, it is foreseen to co-design a policy roadmap and to therefore contribute to the future generation of the European rural and mountain policies.
To this end, MOVING is active in 23 mountain reference regions in 16 countries. These are areas where the project deploys its research activities and actions with the participation of stakeholders through Multi-Actor Platforms (MAPs).
The MOVING Community of Practice (CoP), is built on the 23 MAPs, one in each of our 23 regions, and one additional MAP at European level (EU MAP).
The MOVING CoP is a project cornerstone to carry out a transdisciplinary and participatory approach and to engage stakeholders around resilience to climate change of mountain value chains. It is key to carry out an inclusive and diverse approach, bringing in the diversity of contexts, knowledge systems, challenges, and opportunities.
In the current situation: how do you see the place of mountain food systems?
Resilience is a key concept for MOVING. Our aim is to achieve a resilient and sustainable future for mountain regions, in order to face challenges such as climate change, depopulation, COVID-19, etc.
MOVING is creating an Inventory of mountain value chains, with 452 value chains from all over Europe, including value chains related to food such as plant-based products, livestock, fish, alcohol and soft drinks. They represent a key role in the food systems of mountain regions.
We have so far identified different types of innovative and proactive responses to challenges; for example, innovation in terms of new products or by-products; new governance systems that highlight the role of collective actions; and new approaches for labelling and quality schemes.
How do you address the nexus of climate change and biodiversity in your project?
As recently highlighted by IPBES-IPCC, in the Biodiversity and Climate Change Workshop Report, this nexus is very important and we should think about policies and actions that can simultaneously contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation, and biodiversity protection.
In MOVING we are working on this nexus in three different areas:
- One of the project partners is focusing on the work on the vulnerability analysis of the Stara Planina High Nature Value Farming Value Chain in Bulgaria with a particular focus on grassland and biodiversity loss.
- In MOVING’s analysis of the vulnerability of land-use systems to climate change and other factors, are looking at adaptive capacity mechanisms, and tried to see this nexus in terms of the potential viability and implication of each of these mechanisms for biodiversity.
- At a later stage of the project, when we will specifically work to build the policy roadmap, we will seek to inspire policymakers to look at the future of governance and policy options needed at the climate-biodiversity nexus.