Agrobiodiversity is a key component of overall biodiversity. It is the result of natural selection processes and creative thinking of farmers, herders and fishers over millennia. Agrobiodiversity is a vital, fundamental part of biodiversity. Food and livelihood security and people’s health very much depend on the sustained management of biological resources.

The aforementioned concepts pave the way to understand the reasons why we decided to focus on this domain. In fact agrobiodiversity is the result of complex interactions across space and time between the environment, genetic resources and sustainable management systems and practices. Human assets, like local/indigenous knowledge and different cultural views are therefore essential parts of agrobiodiversity. The very nature of agrobiodiversity implies that solution to global problems, like food security, mitigation of/adaptation to climate change or soil quality degradation, should come from locally available resources and knowledge.

Agrobiodiversity has full potential to solve global food crises and meet people’s demands in every corner of the world as well as to solve problems caused by overly simplification of agricultural systems and unwise globalization.

Awareness-raising and knowledge exchange among local farmers is therefore key to empower them and make them active players in the overall game of agricultural and environmental sustainability. This is one of the goals of CAPSELLA, what the project has been doing in its first year of life span and will be doing in the upcoming months.