A recent joint workshop at the Akrotiri Environmental Education Centre (AEEC) looked at ways to enhance the resilience of the Akrotiri Salt Lake ecosystem.
The workshop, part of the ARISE Darwin Project, gathered experts from the Sovereign Base Areas (SBAs), academics, researchers, and practitioners to assess the potential to achieve sustainability objectives for the area.
The three-year collaboration alongside the Open University of Cyprus, the Republic of Cyprus and the University of Kent, is funded by the UK Government’s Darwin Plus grant scheme.
The ARISE project aims to address these environmental threats through science-based restoration, habitat management, stakeholder engagement and talking abouthow the project will address these key issues.
Senior Conservation and Projects Officer at SBAA Environment Department, Margarita Stavrinide said: “The project has accomplished significant conservation and management work around the Akrotiri Salt Lake.
“New habitats have been created such as two new ponds in the eucalyptus forest supporting rare plants and bird biodiversity. Access to sensitive parts of the area have been blocked, allowing the fragile ecosystem to be naturally restored and important information on rare plants has been collected and seeds were conserved in the national gene-bank.”
Dr Elli Tzirkalli, Postdoctoral Researcher from the Open University of Cyprus who provided an update to the participants on the project, added: “We have also regulated vehicle and visitor access to fragile habitats across the Akrotiri Peninsula.”
The workshop presented scenarios on how different sustainability objectives could be impacted. Experts discussed the possible causes of these impacts and how changes to the ecosystem could affect its resilience.
Dr Tzirkalli continued: “The scenario assessment aims to integrate ecological objectives with socio-economic considerations in the management of the peninsula.
“Last October, participants developed scenarios of possible futures for Akrotiri up to 2050 and now they had to assess how each of these scenarios would affect the sustainability objectives for the people and the nature of the area, in order to identify the management options that best balance conservation with the needs of the local community.
“Having the support of academics, researchers, NGOs, governmental departments and the local community, will enable us to combine conservation actions in the field with participatory planning to secure the long-term resilience of the area, based on scientific evidence and shared by the people who use and manage the Akrotiri Salt Lake.”