- World Habitat Day is celebrated today to promote awareness of urban habitat issues and the importance of a liveable and sustainable environment.
Today, 2 October, coinciding with the first Monday of this month, is World Habitat Day 2023, the perfect occasion to highlight the state of many habitats on the planet. The day was established by the United Nations to promote awareness of urban habitat issues and the importance of a liveable and sustainable environment. World Habitat Day focuses on highlighting the need to address issues such as adequate urban planning, access to decent housing, sustainable transport, natural resource management in urban areas and the promotion of more inclusive and equitable communities.
The loss of natural habitats often leads to the extinction of species that depend on those ecosystems for their survival. Natural habitats are home to a unique variety of flora and fauna, and when they disappear, the species that once inhabited them may be threatened with extinction. The degradation or disappearance of a habitat forces species to seek new places to live and feed. This can lead to forced migration of animals, which can result in conflicts with other species and competition for limited resources. Many human communities depend on natural habitats for resources such as food, medicines and building materials. The disappearance of these ecosystems can lead to shortages of essential resources, negatively affecting people’s livelihoods. The loss of natural habitats can also have a significant economic impact. Ecosystem degradation can affect industries related to tourism, fisheries and agriculture, which in turn can affect the economic stability of a region.
The main objective of the LIFE COSTAdapta project is to adapt island and outermost territories to climate change, enhance biodiversity and maintain the compatibility of residential use and the environment. LIFE COSTAdapta will develop adaptation measures through natural and mixed actions, focused on integration and improvement, both with the natural environment and with the enhancement of cultural elements. To this end, it plans actions to adapt to rising sea levels through the design and testing of an innovative and progressive tidal pool-reef system, which partially uses the traditional technique of building tidal pools, common elements in the Canary Islands and the rest of Macaronesia, for the coastal adaptation of Gran Canaria to climate change.
The development and design of these prototypes with a holistic vision of adaptation to sea level rise, increases its benefits and promotes a solution (blue infrastructure) that encompasses crucial factors in the resilience and quality of life of coastal areas: reduction of the flooding surface, reduction in the height of the sheet of water, adaptability to changing circumstances (modular measures of progressive increase), systems for the creation of marine habitats, creation of places of social enjoyment with easy accessibility, increase of economic activities, improvement of degraded areas, among others.