Values of Biodiversity through the use of Pastoral Land in the Central Draa, Southern Morocco

Abstract

      In this intervention, we raise the issue of the multiple values of biodiversity through the use of pastoral land in areas that straddle the line of biological stability on the margins of the Sahara Desert south of Morocco's central Great Atlas Mountains. This issue puts us in the face of an environmental problem that has a direct bearing on sustainable development. These areas are characterized by fragile environmental balances and offer natural qualifications that are reflected in biodiversity, whose exploitation is regulated by difference and diversity. We therefore wonder how natural qualifications and environmental vulnerability factors reflect on biodiversity and its multiple values in pastoral areas, and what is the need to rehabilitate traditional pastoral ecosystems and systems and to ensure their environmental balances? to end with a fundamental problematic question, can the environmental approach constitute an appropriate methodology and provide ideas on the dynamism of sustainable development in pastoral areas by highlighting the multiple values of biodiversity across the forms of land use in middle Draa in the south of the Central Great Atlas in Morocco?

      In addressing this problem, from the premise that environmental balances in the middle Draa suffer from inherent vulnerability between human beings and resources, its current evolution takes on increasing environmental degradation, which adversely affects biodiversity and its multiple values. This situation is reflected in the region's sustainable development. To illustrate and address this issue, the study relied on an environmental approach and a synthesis methodology in the analysis, embracing an integrated vision of the whole area, with a view to rehabilitating nature and humanity to develop biodiversity values in the direction of what is termed sustainable development.