INCAM

Title: Improving National Assessment and Monitoring Capacities for Integrated Environmental and Coastal ecosystem Management

Summary: The proposal aims to increase Lebanon's capacity in important environmental concerns based on a regional approach that assess the anthropological impacts on natural resources. As a bottom up project, INCAM will first support collection of existing research data to assess the status of natural resources and identify knowledge gaps in environmental assessment capacities, especially in the intensively developed Lebanese coastal zones.

A detailed action plan will be developed to strengthen institutional capacities of the Lebanese National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS) and convert it into a national and regional research centre of excellence. Further on, the project will enhance EU regional cooperation and networking by increasing the role of the EC in general and of the FP7 in particular. Special attention is given to training and dissemination. Two regional workshops on environmental institutional capacity building will be organised in Jordan and Egypt. This last event will tackle more deeply issues related to integrated coastal zone management and will be combined with the final project conference open to national, regional, international and EU stakeholders. Local dissemination and public awareness activities will be organised in critical 'hot spot' areas in Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt.

The project splits into six scientific work packages in addition to one that deals with coordination and management.The major outcome will be increasing the leading scientific role of CNRS and its centres and productive exchange of experts between the region and the EU. Short training courses will be organised for Lebanese researchers in the EU countries and young students will pursue MSc thesis in Italy. The project duration will be 24 months. The leading organization is CNRS-Lebanon and the other two partners are the Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Bari (IAM-B), Italy and Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement (IRD) of Toulouse, France.

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