Knowledge Management Portal

Knowledge Unit Objectives Enhancing job opportunities and social inclusion for youth, through training activities and accompanying paths (MEDABincubator activities) to fostering business culture and the creation of innovative start-ups, focusing on areas more concerned with migration and social instability phenomena. Strengthen youth enterprises component in cooperation projects Enhancing the innovation and knowledge transfer through the intensification of the collaboration among researchers and enterprises, with a focus on young people. Strengthening of the relationships among CIHEAM, private sector and the different actors of the job market and innovation chain, developing innovative tools and methods to favor the innovation transfer and adaptation in the Mediterranean region. Developing the model of Mediterranean rural social innovation and strengthening Social Innovation component in cooperation projects Strengthening the Mediterranean Innovation Ecosystem through MIP Network activities and creating a Mediterranean Business Network Data base and Observatory.

One of the challenges of eco-efficient agriculture is the development of operational farming practices to increase the level of agricultural production, maximize the efficiency of resource use and reduce environmental impacts. Based on the efficiency frontier concept and the decomposition of resource use efficiency, we used a three-quadrant framework allowing to carry a functional analysis of the cropping system. Using a data envelope approach, we established boundary curves which represent the maximum achievable performances (yield, N uptake) when N is the only limiting factor. This framework has been first implemented and tested using published data from 112 agronomic situations of rainfed durum wheat in experimental fields in northern Syria and then further applied on a data set of 245 agronomic situations of durum wheat in farmers’ fields in two grain-producing regions of Tunisia. The results demonstrated the impact of preceding crops: durum wheat following legumes or vegetable showed a higher potential for N uptake but with only a minor effect on its conversion into grains. This positive effect of diversified rotation on potential N uptake by durum wheat is partly of-set by increased N uptake gaps in farmer’s fields indicating a higher effect of other limiting factors.

Small grain cereals (mainly barley and bread and durum wheat) are the most important staple crops in Europe and in the Mediterranean region. Over the past century, breeding has been able to provide the highest yield increase ever seen, although now in many regions a yield plateau is evident. Climate change may be the single unifying, and chronic issue that will affect everyone and every aspect of the economy. Changes in weather patterns and variability, as well as differential combinations of effects in different parts of Europe and the Mediterranean region are expected. The North will see warmer and wetter weather, whereas the South will experience more frequent and severe droughts and heat waves, and in both cases there will be a shifting pattern of incidence of pests and diseases. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) models predict that average yields of cereals will fall due to drought, insect predation and diseases, whilst the demand for food will rise significantly due to population growth. The identification of new varieties adapted to the expected climatic conditions requires the accurate prediction of the new scenarios and the efficient use of genetic resources and advanced genomic tools. The recent progress in plant genomics and phenotyping offers the opportunity for a next generation breeding era to overcome the limitations of traditional breeding. The course presents, using a multidisciplinary approach, the most recent research for an advanced knowledge-based breeding to cope with climate uncertainty. The aims of the course are: (i) to raise awareness of the extra challenges imposed by climate change to food security and cereal breeding; (ii) to give guidance on the impact and uses of recent advances on genomics, phenomics and modelling for cereal breeding; and (iii) to provide an integrated overview of the strategies that must be considered to increase breeding effectiveness.

Uncontrolled fires resulted from irrational land management caused 17-24% of woodlands burnt, 3.4-20.5 million tons of biomass loss, and emitted 1.4-8.1 million tons of C into atmosphere every winter (or dry season). The huge amount of carbon, that could have been avoided, due to the irrational land management and practice, was emitted. 2. Differencing and conditional thresholding at ICL unit (ICLU) level (the approach developed in this study), may provide rather accurate burnt scars detection, 90.5-98.5% in accuracy. Better than the burnt area product NASA which was 1.5-4.5% lower in accuracy than our results. 3. The findings and results of the study could serve as references to decision makers in tropical Africa to improve land management and control carbon emission to mitigating climate change.

This study considers a quantitative approach for assessing the performance of Tunisian farming systems to face climate change. It is based on the resilience concept and the calculation, with a modelling chain, of three indicators: land stock, labour stock, and income flux. Two system states, “base” and “climate change”, and a time horizon of 2010–2025, are developed and compared for representative farming systems. The study shows that 55% of the farming systems were identified as being resilient to climate change. They are diversified and mostly grow cereals, vegetables, and forage crops combined with livestock, increasing their capability to mitigate climate change by reorganizing crop activities. 35% of the farms identified as being non-resilient are dominated by orchards, or cereals and orchards. They showed an important drop in farm income (−45%), mainly due to their inability to adapt their cropping systems to water stress and soil salinity. Finally, only 10% were identified as being poorly resilient farming systems. Those farms have mainly intensified cereal cropping systems based on a strategy of purchasing land to increase the surface area of profitable activities (forage and livestock). Overall, the methodology can be adapted for other dry land areas in the Mediterranean region and help experts and policy-makers to propose and test strategies for adapting to climate change.

In the context of the Paris Agreement on climate change, all the economic sectors have to reduce GHG emissions. The agricultural sector is responsible for about 10-12% of anthropogenic GHG emissions worldwide. Many studies have shown that there is potential to reduce GHG emissions and enhance soil carbon sequestration in agriculture. However, emissions in the agricultural sector are mostly biogenic and driven by multiple and interacting processes, which hampers reliable/robust estimates. Moreover, bridging the gap between scientific knowledge in GHG mitigation, decision making and policy implementation remains challenging.

Calcisols are soils with substantial accumulation of secondary lime and the name of Calcisols derives from the Latin calx which means lime. They are described as “Soils having a calcic or petrocalcic horizon within 100 cm of the surface and no diagnostic horizons other than an ochric or cambic horizon, an argic horizon which is calcareous, a vertic horizon, or a gypsic horizon underlying a petrocalcic horizon.”

Collaboration between actors is an important determinant of water governance, particularly in developing countries suffering from lack of institutional and organizational performances for water management. The objective of this paper is to use the social network (SN) concept in bringing depth to the understanding of local irrigation governance in three irrigated schemes located in dry regions of southern Tunisia. Local stakeholders in the considered schemes interact around different water-related issues. These include authorizations for access to water, extension services for irrigated crops, training on the use of irrigation technologies, and finance and subsidies of irrigation water saving equipment. We considered each of these types of interactions as different tie and we mapped social networks around each of them. Foreach network, actors’ densities, frequencies, and weight were reported. The results were revealing that better performances of water management are observed in areas with high SN density and high centrality of water users’ associations. The relative "weights" of actors in the three considered areas were significantly different, indicating that the application of a standard decentralization process of irrigation water may result in different local organizational arrangements, depending on pat- terns of social interactions.