Search

Conservation and restoration projects often fail to engage local communities during the planning and implementation stage. In addition, when considering urban boundary ecosystems, there exists a wide range of stakeholders that must be involved in the planning process to ensure social equity in land management outcomes. Traditional methods for assessing future landscape change scenarios have been critiqued for their inability to adequately incorporate the diverse range of stakeholder values. This paper presents a multicriteria mapping study, incorporating a novel application of the Nature Futures Framework, to assess nature recovery scenarios on Brighton and Hove’s Downland Estate—an urban boundary landscape surrounding the city of Brighton and Hove in Sussex, South East England. We focus on two key research outcomes. First, we assess the perceived performance of alternative nature recovery options across Nature Future value perspectives and between contrasting stakeholder groups. Second, by mapping stakeholder values from our multicriteria mapping study, we demonstrate that the Nature Futures Framework provides a robust framework within which to assess the diverse values stakeholders hold for land use change. We propose that utilizing the Nature Futures Framework, in combination with the multicriteria mapping interview technique, can form a valuable tool to elicit stakeholder values that may have been hidden, or underrepresented in traditional assessment methods, and to compare the perceived performance of alternative nature recovery scenarios between stakeholder groups.

As we progress through the United Nations' “Decade of Restoration”, we face the challenge of identifying and developing restoration funding mechanisms for two reasons. First, given past failures at the global level to meet restoration goals, funding mechanisms are needed that allow for scaling up restoration efforts. Second, restoration approaches are changing, with an increasing focus on functional and dynamic restoration goals. Rewilding is an emerging ecological restoration strategy that addresses both of these challenges by restoring self-sustaining complex ecosystems characterized by minimal human interference. As of yet there has been little attention paid to rewilding in the discussion around restoration funding. We suggest that rewilding offers a promising avenue for restoration funding in Europe. However, the unique characteristics of rewilding may also lead to challenges when attempting to tap into existing funding streams, which may need to be modified to better suit rewilding special needs.