Suchergebnisse

In past years, communication activities have become increasingly important in the environment and health domain, considering the concurrent developments of social media and scientific citizenship that contributed changes in legislation and culture. Communication is particularly crucial where an environmental hazard is present, as in the case of high risk environmental and health risk areas. The project "International Center of Advanced Study in Environment, Ecosystem and Human Health" (CISAS), carried out by the Italian National Research Council, covers multiple research activities, from ecology to biology and medical sciences, from epidemiology to social sciences and communication. Three different studies based on human biomonitoring and a birth cohort study are currently in progress in the project locations, together with studies on the environmental fate of pollutants. A clear, accurate and respectful communication of study protocols and results represents a priority to produce comprehensible information available for policy makers, citizens, and stakeholders. This paper describes the multiple external and internal communication activities planned in the framework of the CISAS project as an example of promotion of knowledge in the society at large and improvement of risk management in the environmental health domain.

The COVID-19 pandemic provides a major opportunity to study fishing effort dynamics and to assess the response of the industry to standard and remedial actions. Knowing a fishing fleet's capacity to compensate for effort reduction (i.e., its resilience) allows differentiating governmental regulations by fleet, i.e., imposing stronger restrictions on the more resilient and weaker restrictions on the less resilient. In the present research, the response of the main fishing fleets of the Adriatic Sea to fishing hour reduction from 2015 to 2020 was measured. Fleet activity per gear type was inferred from monthly Automatic Identification System data. Pattern recognition techniques were applied to study the fishing effort trends and barycentres by gear. The beneficial effects of the lockdowns on Adriatic endangered, threatened and protected (ETP) species were also estimated. Finally, fleet effort series were examined through a stock assessment model to demonstrate that every Adriatic fishing fleet generally behaves like a stock subject to significant stress, which was particularly highlighted by the pandemic. Our findings lend support to the notion that the Adriatic fleets can be compared to predators with medium-high resilience and a generally strong impact on ETP species.

In the last decade, several initiatives have been taken at a European level to adopt the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) by promoting coordination and stimulating integrated actions leading to consistent views on its final goal: the achievement of good environmental status (GES). In its holistic approach, the MSFD fully acknowledges the complexity and variability of marine ecosystems and demands constant scientific support for its actual implementation. Recently, the Joint Programming Initiative on "Healthy and Productive Seas and Oceans" (JPI Oceans) launched the joint action "Science for Good Environmental Status" (Science4GES), building on the contribution of different scientific disciplines and communities to better fulfill the scope of the MSFD. In this paper we illustrate and discuss a few crucial aspects of endeavors to implement the MSFD specifically implied in the definition of the metrics for the 11 descriptors and GES in its complexity, as well as improving the strategy governing its implementation. This presentation also describes the challenges, aims and implementation plan for the JPI-O joint action, where a transdisciplinary approach may help in progressing from the comprehensive and far-reaching vision of the MSFD to the achievement of a durable GES ; peer-reviewed