Search

Nature-based solutions (NBS) in river landscapes, such as restoring floodplains, can not only decrease flood risks for downstream communities but also provide co-benefits in terms of habitat creation for numerous species and enhanced delivery of diverse ecosystem services. This paper aims to explore how landscape planning and governance research can contribute to the identification, design and implementation of NBS, using the example of water-related challenges in the landscape of the Lahn river in Germany. The objectives are (i) to introduce the NBS concept and to provide a concise definition for application in planning research, (ii) to explore how landscape planning and governance research might support a targeted use and implementation of NBS, and (iii) to propose an agenda for further research and practical experimentation. Our methods include a focused literature review and conceptual framework development. We define NBS as actions that alleviate a well-defined societal challenge (challenge-orientation), employ ecosystem processes of spatial, blue and green infrastructure networks (ecosystem processes utilization), and are embedded within viable governance or business models for implementation (practical viability). Our conceptual framework illustrates the functions of NBS in social-ecological landscape systems, and highlights the complementary contributions of landscape planning and governance research in developing and implementing NBS. Finally, a research and experimentation agenda is proposed, focusing on knowledge gaps in the effectiveness of NBS, useful approaches for informed co-design of NBS, and options for implementation. Insights from this paper can guide further studies and support testing of the NBS concept in practice.

This chapter describes the potential of different EU policies for implementing the concept of ecosystem services (ES) at different scales. We provide an overview of a broad range of EU policies and their role as drivers for ecosystem services provision and impairment on the regional and local scale and present the consideration of the ES concept within these policies. This is based on research conducted in the EU FP7 OpenNESS project. Additionally, we provide examples of the implementation of selected policies in EU Member States: the EU Water Framework Directive and Public Policy Appraisals allowing for a more in-depth evaluation of opportunities and obstacles of the implementation processes.

The opening up of China's industry towards market orientation has a distinct impact on natural resources as well as on social structures. The example of rubber introduction in Yunnan province (SW China) shows the mutual interdependencies between economy, natural resources, and social structures. We assess the impacts of rubber introduction and possible development paths in the study area. An integrated modeling framework (NabanFrame) is developed for the catchment of the Naban River (size 270 km2), a tributary to the Mekong River. NabanFrame comprises an agro-economic, ecological, and social model. Altogether they interact with a land-use change model via defined interfaces. Effects on the water cycle are considered by additionally integrating the spatially distributed rainfall-runoff and water balance model AKWA-M® in the model framework. Therefore, a reasonable parameterization is needed to assess the land-use changes on areal water fluxes. The authors conclude that the chosen hydrological model is able to assess the impacts of land conversion (from forest to rubber plantations) on catchment hydrology and address further adaptations to be implemented in the hydrological model.

Managing the diversity of the enlarged European Union (EU) is a central task for European policies. It is argued that this diversity leads to the development of a core-periphery pattern, separating cores of economic strength from peripheral regions being on the margins and lagging behind with mainly rural areas playing the peripheral part. This chapter describes the approach taken by the FP7 EU research project RUFUS – Rural Future Networks. It concentrated on rural regions and tried to work out the implications of the diversity of European rural areas by creating an interdisciplinary typology. The RUFUS typology is based on nine economic, social and ecological indicators and included regions (NUT3 level) from 10 European countries. A factor and cluster analysis was performed leading to a set of types of rural areas displaying their strengths and weaknesses related to their economic, social and ecological characteristics. The analysis was performed with different combinations of countries. The data set based on countries within the EU15 led to a first typology of four types showing a specific distribution of strong(er) and weak(er) types of regions already functioning for a longer time in the context of EU integration. Including more Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries led to a set of five types combined with the change of type distribution within and between the countries. The approach is an easy to understand classification and visualisation tool to show the relative development status of European regions as well as the relationship of the status with their location (core or border region).

Land use planning has to consider different development goals, for instance, economic profit, biodiversity conservation, and the protection of traditional land use techniques. To evaluate different land use change scenarios for sustainable development, land use managers in the study area in southwest of China were provided with an integrated modelling approach. We applied the CLUE-Naban land-change model and a GAMS-based village farm household model (VFHM) to model a business as usual scenario (BAU) at the regional scale. The scenario was driven by the demand for different land cover types, as given by the VFHM model. In our approach, this aggregated demand was disaggregated to grid cells of 0.09 ha size with the help of the CLUE-Naban land-change model and the farm types were defined as interface between the two models. Two farm types with characteristic land management regimes and public land type were identified using cluster analysis. The results of the BAU-scenario show that the area of rubber plantation in the lowlands more likely to increase until the year 2025. Hemp was introduced as a cash crop in the highlands of the study area. Areas with the most land use changes were where land was converted from extensively-used cropland to intensively-used rubber plantations. In this paper, an organizational heuristic with two conceptual models for linking land change with driving forces and actors is presented. Therefore, the CLUE-Naban approach can contribute to improve land use planning, because this approach creates spatially explicit land use change scenarios at the regional scale and also considers the socioeconomic driving factors that influence land management issues as considered in the VFHM model.

Land use modelling has used rural areas as object for a long time. Modellers start in general with physical landscape factors to determine the spatial distribution of land use, especially agricultural crops. An important factor defining rural areas is the dominance of livelihoods/economies based on agriculture combined with a strong relationship to tradition, high value of family ties, scales of social aggregation, and a framework given by nature. The inter-linkages among economic, social and environmental components determine both the complexity and dynamics of rural development. Both modellers and social scientists seek a better understanding of these complex rural systems in terms of their development paths, the underlying forces and the interactions between physical land use and rural society. In this paper, we use a combination of a land use change model and information about social relationship by referring both to the common spatial unit of villages for a rural region in south west China. We want to show how such a common unit can help to include social science information into a physically oriented land use model. The inclusion of social data results in a substantial improvement of the modelling results. In the model run we could show that land use patterns in the study area were closely related to socio-economic characteristics and governmental rules. In China, collective land and state land are distinguished. This land designation turned out to be the most important factor for the land use types rainfed, irrigated land, and rubber. All land use types were influenced by the ethnicity of village inhabitants because they had different land use traditions.

Land-cover changes cause a loss of natural vegetation in many parts of the world. In the Xishuangbanna (西双版纳) district (Yunnan (云南) Province), rubber plantations replace tropical rainforests covering already an area of about 10% of the study area (2007). There, land-use allocation is mostly driven by economic considerations. Thus, local planning authorities need decision support for land-use planning issues, which integrate socio-economic and ecological aspects. Within the NabanFrame, an agro-economic, ecological and social model was applied, which, altogether, interacted with a land allocation model via defined interfaces. Effects on the water cycle, ecological conditions as well as socio-economic should be considered by integrating the spatially distributed rainfall-runoff and water balance model AKWA-M® in the model setup.

A multitude of rural areas is facing increasing conflicts with regard to rural development and nature conservation because of the rapid commercialization of farming and the building and improvement of roads. In Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, South West China, this development results in strong land use changes. An analysis of these changes demands an integrated approach addressing their ecological, social, and economic dimensions. Using a combined modelling system, the NabanFrame Modeling Framework, the interdisciplinary research project LILAC was able to provide the calculation of scenarios based on the current state of land use and economic and ecological effects. The papers in the special issue combine description of the different components of the framework with some examples of scenarios calculated with the framework. Furthermore, frame conditions for better implementation of environmentally friendly land use options are explored. The role of interdisciplinary research in the development of site-adapted and integrated land use solutions is described.

Healthy soils are crucial for human well-being. Because soils are threatened worldwide, politicians recognize the need for soil protection. For example, the European Commission has launched the Thematic Strategy for Soil Protection, which requests the European member states to identify high risk areas for soil degradation. Most states use the Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE) to assess soil erosion risk at the national scale. The USLE includes different factors, one of them is the vegetation cover and management factor (C factor). Modern satellite-based radar sensors now provide highly accurate vegetation cover data, enabling opportunities to improve the accuracy of the C factor. The presented study proves the suitability for C factor determination based on a multi-temporal classification of high-resolution radar images. Further USLE factors were derived from existing data sources (meteorological data, soil maps, digital elevation model) to conduct an USLE-based soil erosion assessment. The resulting map illustrates a qualitative assessment for soil erosion risk within a plot of about 7*12 km in an agricultural region in Poland that is very susceptible to soil erosion processes. A high erosion risk of more than 10 tonnes per ha and year was assessed to occur on 13.6% (646 ha) of the agricultural areas within the investigated plot. Further 7.8% (372 ha) of agricultural land is threaten by a medium risk of 5–10 tonnes per ha and year. Such a spatial information about areas of high or medium soil erosion risk are crucial for the development of strategies for the protection of soils.

Assessing the impact of climate change on agriculture is a new challenge for quantitative model-based policy analysis. The impact of climate change will vary strongly across regions depending on pre-existing climatic, agronomic, and political conditions. Most of the present modeling approaches, which aim to analyze the impact of global change on agriculture, deliver aggregated results both with regard to content and spatial resolution. To deliver results with a higher spatial resolution and to produce a more detailed picture of agricultural production, the county-based agro-economic model known as ACRE-Danube was developed. The German and Austrian part of the Upper Danube basin, a study area with great diversity in agricultural landscapes and climatic conditions, was chosen for study. For the analysis, two scenarios of climatic and socio-economic change were derived. The first and more economically and globally oriented scenario, termed ¿¿Full Liberalization,¿ included significant temperature increases. The second and more environmentally and regionally oriented ¿¿Full Protection¿ scenario included a moderate temperature increase. Both scenarios produce different results regarding agricultural income and land use. While the developments in the Full Protection scenario are small, the Full Liberalization scenario yields extreme regional changes in agricultural income, an increase in cereal production and extensive grassland farming., JRC.J.5-Agriculture and Life Sciences in the Economy

An interdisciplinary model network consisting of the regional agricultural economic model RAUMIS and the hydro(geo)logical models GROWA/WEKU is used to analyze the effect of different scenarios of maximum agricultural nitrogen balance surplus on water quality. The study area is the federal state of Lower Saxony, Germany, which features heterogeneous natural site conditions as well as agricultural production structures. A focus of the study is the modeling of supra-regional manure transports that, according to the model's results, considerably increase due to a lowering of maximum nitrogen balance surpluses. The assessment of the examined nitrogen reduction measures reveals that adequate indicators have to be applied. In this regard, the model results show that even though the analyzed measure leads to a substantial overall reduction of agricultural nitrogen surpluses, nitrogen discharges into surface and groundwater can regionally increase.

Neu im Datenbankangebot des DIMDI ist seit l. April 1999 EUROETHICS, eine europaische Literaturdatenbank zum Thema Ethik in der Medizin und Bioethik. Die Datenbank ist ein Produkt des EUROETHICS Health Network (EHN), das mit Forderung der Europaischen Kommission im Rahmen des BIOMED-2-Projekts „European Data Base Network“ gegrundet wurde. Sie wird arbeitsteilig von zur Zeit folgenden vier Einrichtungen hergestellt: ◗ Informations- und Dokumentationsstelle Ethik in der Medizin (IDEM) der Akademie fur Ethik in der Medizin, Gottingen ◗ Centre de documentation en ethique des sciences de la vie et de la sante (CDEI) INSERM, Paris ◗ Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen (KUN), Faculty of Medical Sciences, Department of Ethics, Philosophy and History of Medicine, Nijmegen, ◗ SPRI Swedish Institute for Health Services Development, Stockholm.

The inclusion of ecosystem development goals would be an important aspect for environmental planning and management, particularly, with respect to the aspect of sustainability. However, eco targets and orientors such as self-organization principles, energy-dissipation, catastrophe topologies, exergy and lolling cycles compiled by analysts to determine the inherent principles of ecosystem development, may provide “intriguing perspectives for further study and some intuitive images of what a healthy environment is all about. But they have not been made practically operational for routine application” (Regier 1993). These impressions had also arisen by discussing the possibilities of using orientors as a tool for the planning process according to the contributed papers in this chapter. Orientors appear to be more of an idealistic picture of the desirable state of ecosystems, being in harmony and without any human influence. They are either designed within more theoretical (modeled) worlds of ideas, e.g. as background for dynamic modeling based on physical laws mostly or derived from measurements and surveys of natural ecosystems. That means, they try to describe a more or less optimal state or functioning of ecosystems. If orientors should be used as tools in environmental planning and management, various requirements have to be met.

In today’s practice of environmental management and nature protection a great variety of orientors are in use. Criteria for the question, what should be protected and which goal should aimed at in landscape management, have been evaluated e.g. by Margules and Usher (1981), Roweck (1994) and Usher and Erz (1994). When determining eco targets for landscape development, one obviously has to take into account results from ecological research; it would be nonsense to aim at goals which cannot be reached because of physical constraints. Nevertheless, orientors for management of nature in anthropogenic landscapes seem to be determined to a high extent by societies decisions, perhaps more than by natural science. Hence, the goals in use are manifold, and sometimes they are mixed in a fairly arbitrary way. On the other hand, some nature protectionists and landscape planners may follow their own leading idea of management and protection, only.