“Building a shared future for all life” – this is the theme of World Biodiversity Day convened by the UN in 1993 on the occasion of the entry into force of the Convention on Biological Diversity.
As Antonello Provenzale, a CNR researcher and member of the CIMA Research Foundation’s scientific council, points out: “biodiversity is an essential aspect of life on Earth, which has deep links with the ability of ecosystems to withstand external stresses and which sustains a large part of the benefits that intact ecosystems provide to humanity. The biodiversity loss due the human activity is one of the great problems of this century, combining in sometimes unpredictable ways with the damage caused by climate change. It is necessary to address the Nnexus between biodiversity loss, climate change, ecosystem integrity and natural hazards in a systemic way, developing development and management strategies to preserve biodiversity at all levels. Italy is investing heavily in this challenge, as proven by the inclusion of biodiversity protection in our country’s Constitution and the development of a large national biodiversity centre, dedicated both to research and to concrete actions and technology transfer.”
Among the primary goals of the Green Deal, the valorisation of the restoration and protection of biodiversity and the integrity of terrestrial and marine ecosystems is also at the heart of our research programmes, both in terms of preserving the richness of natural capital and reducing the risk of natural disasters. In fact, one of our research programmes includes just this: studying actions that enable the use of ‘Nature Based Solutions’ in DRR.
On the marine environment level, the results of research carried out in 2021 on the marine megafauna in the Mediterranean Sea, a biodiversity hotspot threatened by direct (such as water pollution, overfishing and collision-related maritime traffic) and indirect (such as the effects of climate change and the consequent warming of the waters) human actions, are available on SEAWETRA. SEAWETRA is a web-gis platform designed for the monitoring and conservation of Mediterranean marine ecosystems, through which it is possible to visualise various oceanographic and biological data.
As regards the forest environment, the issue of biodiversity is closely linked to the risk of fires and the interaction between ecosystem characteristics and fires, with the aim of exploring the connections between risk reduction strategies and productive management of forest resources, also thanks to machine-learning systems with which we are already conducting the first research on forest biodiversity patterns.