This year’s World Environment Day, celebrated on the 5th of June, is focusing on “Reimagine. Recreate. Restore” and several COST Actions are working on making ecosystems, the web of life on Earth, better. Created in 1974, the World Environment day addresses pressing environmental issues and reminds the general public that from sustainable ecosystems depends on our planet’ survival.
Thanks to their many networking activities, COST Actions contribute to protecting the environment by developing new ideas, by establishing new set of rules, by homogenizing international policies or by developing innovative practices in areas as vast as buildings, landscapes, bees, lake or even planting trees, to only name a few. This year’s World Environment Day reminds us that if ecosystems are fragile and need to be well-balanced and preserved, each individual’s small action makes a strong local impact.
Transforming urban landscape into sustainable environment
Nature, of course must be protected, but sustainability can also be achieved in urban environments such as our cities. COST Action “Implementing nature-based solutions for creating a resourceful circular city”(Circular City) is working precisely on this topic. By assessing how cities need to face new challenges such as resource depletion, climate change or gradation of ecosystems, the Action acknowledges that transforming cities into sustainable systems is necessary. This transformation can be operated through Nature-Based Solutions (NBS), a range of ecosystem services beneficial for the environment: clean water production, green buildings, nutrient recovery, heavy metal retention are only a few of NBS. With a holistic approach and a Circular Economy Philosophy based on “Reduce, Reuse and Recover”, the network aims to implement NBS through an interdisciplinary platform for managing nutrients and resources within the urban biosphere to lead to a resilient, sustainable and healthy urban environment.
Another Action, “REthinking Sustainability TOwards a Regenerative Economy” (RESTORE) is also working on affecting a paradigm shift towards of restorative sustainability in buildings and design space. By bringing together engineers companies, architects, freelancers and researchers, RESTORE is trying the change the status quo of today’s practices through ecology, equity and health, thus addressing the urgent needs to adopt net-positive, restorative sustainability thinking to incrementally do “more good”.
Managing biodiversity to develop it
Restoration practices are not only about improving ecosystems created by society. It is also about repairing damages caused on biodiversity and on wildlife which are too often threatened by human’s activities. Protecting and bringing back pant and animals on the brink in extinction is one of the first steps to manage biodiversity. The recent rapid environment and climate changes are causing species to decline at a worrying rate, and sometimes to go extinct before we could even have discovered them. COST Action “An integrated approach to conservation of threatened plants for the 21st Century” (ConservePlants) is working precisely on this topic by trying to improve plants conservation in Europe, and most specifically the conservation of threatened plants. As pointed out by the Action, high goals have been set by conservationists to prevent extinction, but those conservation initiatives are unfortunately scattered across Europe and have not yielded satisfactory results yet. To address this issue, the COST network is bringing together scientists, stakeholders, area’s managers and social scientists dealing with different aspect of plants conservation, from taxonomy, conservation genetics and conservation physiology to reproductive biology. One of the final goals is to raise awareness to the general public about plants preservation and to encourage the re-evaluation of red species lists.
CONVERGES Action is coordinating research effort to preserve riparian ecosystems
It is not by chance that Earth has been named the Blue Planet. Water is said to have enabled life on Earth and covers more than 70% of its surface allowing flora and fauna flourish. Better understanding how vegetation around oceans, rivers and streams helps to protect landscape in one of today’s challenges. Riparian ecosystems – the physical environment and biological communities that lay at the interface of freshwater and terrestrial systems – are, for instance, crucial to biodiversity. For example, they protect stream-water quality by filtering out toxic compounds and excess nutrients from runoff; they are a source of organic material to aquatic ecosystems forming the base of aquatic food chains and they stabilize riverbanks and reduces erosion. Unfortunately, Riparian Vegetation is one of the most degraded ecosystems by human pressure; and policies to preserve it are scattered and not homogeneous. COST Action “Knowledge conversion for enhancing management of European riparian ecosystems and services” (CONVERGES) is trying to fill this gap by gathering scientists, stakeholders and policy makers from across Europe to enhance the management of Riparian Vegetation and, most importantly, to coordinate research effort to protect such a precious ecosystem.
Further reading:
- World Bee day: a global challenge requiring global networking
- Highlighting Citizen Science on Earth Day
- Planting for the future, this is our motivation for the International Day of Forests.