The Agadir Platform: A Transatlantic Cooperation to Achieve Sustainable Drylands

Abstract

For the purpose of achieving sustainable development in the context of a changing climate, the development and implementation of tripartite cooperation tools, into a transatlantic cooperation framework, is the crux of a project to bring about a transdisciplinary platform focused on research, technology, and innovation in drylands. It finds its roots in the Agadir Declaration of May 2016. The objective of the platform is to set up a “hub or rear base” at the University of Ibn Zohr in Agadir to develop transdisciplinary research and training mechanisms on climate change and its impacts on the functioning of ecosystems and their goods and services in arid and semiarid regions. Currently, the main challenge to achieve sustainable development resides in ensuring that decision-making processes are supported by science. How to translate scientific knowledge on complex long-term issues at the national, cross-regional, and transatlantic scale into better informed public policy remains an open question for multi-sectoral partnerships. The main thread underlying this chapter relates to the establishment of interface models between science and policy: what challenges will the Agadir Platform assume to bridge various forms of interdisciplinary science and policy expertise to inform decision-makers on long-term wicked problems related to drylands socio-ecological systems?