Location

Venue

LNEC: National Laboratory for Civil Engineering

Bus: 717, 731, 750, 783

Metro Lisboa: Alvalade station (green line)

AIM

The Cultural Landscapes Conference aims to discuss and widen the cultural landscapes approach with its diverse elements such as climate crisis adaptation and mitigation, biodiversity conservation and empowerment of rural livelihoods. The conference will showcase the results of the AMNC’s work as well as serve as a key occasion for learning from each other and developing synergies and collaborations for the future of conservation of cultural landscapes in the Mediterranean via engagement with practitioners, conservationists, researchers, policymakers and the private sector.

The event will contribute to demonstrating and promoting:

• The knowledge about the links between cultural practices, biodiversity and climate crisis and how these links support human wellbeing;
• The approaches which ensure economic and financial sustainability of cultural practice-based economies;
• The advocacy work that enables policy changes in favour of cultural practices and cultural landscapes;
• The governance systems for participatory cultural landscapes management;
• The approaches which strengthen local capacities for improved and sustainable management practices;

while offering a space for exchanging ideas and experiences, learning from each other and co-initiating new ideas, actions, and collaborations for the future of conservation of cultural landscapes in the Mediterranean.

The event will be a milestone for the Alliance for Mediterranean Nature and Culture, marking the transition to a new period, with different dynamics and goals, as the MAVA Foundation comes to a close. The celebration will showcase the AMNC’s regional work and impact and also provide opportunities to initiate new partnerships in the Mediterranean.

We aim to scale up the cultural landscapes approach and the outcomes of our work, ensuring the Alliance’s value as an effective and durable regional actor for cultural landscapes. Our hope is to make the cultural landscapes approach more visible and recognised by relevant stakeholders at regional and international levels, nature conservation organisations, academia, donor organisations and the private sector. This event will accordingly address the possibility of building strategic alliances at regional and international levels to this end.

SCOPE

On the other hand, cultural practices are shared perceptions of how people routinely behave in a culture and so are the customary, habitual, or expected procedures or ways of acting, performing, producing, and doing something. They reflect and are built on knowledge, beliefs, and institutions of a society for periods often spanning generations. In our understanding, this definition includes but is not limited to production systems such as traditional agriculture, pastoralism, traditional forestry, harvesting of edible plants and traditional management of salinas and fishery.

Our conference in this context will host several plenary sessions, exhibitions and screenings disseminating the links between cultural landscapes, sustainability and social well-being, as well as exchange sessions inviting participants to explore new collaborations, synergies and actions for conservation of cultural landscapes in the Mediterranean region.

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

Download the program here.

Download the workshop abstracts here.