Identifying hotspots and management of critical ecosystem services in rapidly urbanizing Yangtze River Delta Region, China

Rapid urbanization has altered many ecosystems, causing a decline in many ecosystem services, generating serious ecological crisis. To cope with these challenges, we presented a comprehensive framework comprising five core steps for identifying and managing hotspots of critical ecosystem services in a rapid urbanizing region. This framework was applied in the case study of the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) Region. The study showed that there was large spatial heterogeneity in the hotspots of ecosystem services in the region, hotspots of supporting services and regulating services aggregately distributing in the southwest mountainous areas while hotspots of provisioning services mainly in the northeast plain, and hotspots of cultural services widespread in the waterbodies and southwest mountainous areas. The regionalization of the critical ecosystem services was made through the hotspot analysis. This study provided valuable information for environmental planning and management in a rapid urbanizing region and helped improve China's ecological redlines policy at regional scale

Municipal transitions: The social, energy, and spatial dynamics of sociotechnical change in South Tyrol, Italy

With the aim of proposing recommendations on how to use social and territorial specificities as levers for wider achievement of climate and energy targets at local level, this research analyses territories as sociotechnical systems. Defining the territory as a sociotechnical system allows us to underline the interrelations between space, energy and society. Groups of municipalities in a region can be identified with respect to their potential production of renewable energy by means of well-known data-mining approaches. Similar municipalities linking together can share ideas and promote collaborations, supporting clever social planning in the transition towards a new energy system. The methodology is applied to the South Tyrol case study (Italy). Results show eight different spatially-based sociotechnical systems within the coherent cultural and institutional context of South Tyrol. In particular, this paper observes eight different systems in terms of (1) different renewable energy source preferences in semi-urban and rural contexts; (2) different links with other local planning, management, and policy needs; (3) different socio-demographic specificities of individuals and families; (4) presence of different kinds of stakeholders or of (5) different socio-spatial organizations based on land cover. Each energy system has its own specificities and potentialities, including social and spatial dimensions, that can address a more balanced, inclusive, equal, and accelerated energy transition at the local and translocal scale

Cultural heritage and sustainable development targets : a possible harmonisation? Insights from the European Perspective

The Agenda 2030 includes a set of targets that need to be achieved by 2030. Although none of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) focuses exclusively on cultural heritage, the resulting Agenda includes explicit reference to heritage in SDG 11.4 and indirect reference to other Goals. Achievement of international targets shall happen at local and national level, and therefore, it is crucial to understand how interventions on local heritage are monitored nationally, therefore feeding into the sustainable development framework. This paper is focused on gauging the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals with reference to cultural heritage, by interrogating the current way of classifying it (and consequently monitoring). In fact, there is no common dataset associated with monitoring SDGs, and the field of heritage is extremely complex and diversified. The purpose for the paper is to understand if the taxonomy used by different national databases allows consistency in the classification and valuing of the different assets categories. The European case study has been chosen as field of investigation, in order to pilot a methodology that can be expanded in further research. A cross‐comparison of a selected sample of publicly accessible national cultural heritage databases has been conducted. As a result, this study confirms the existence of general harmonisation of data towards the achievement of the SDGs with a broad agreement of the conceptualisation of cultural heritage with international frameworks, thus confirming that consistency exists in the classification and valuing of the different assets categories. However, diverse challenges of achieving a consistent and coherent approach to integrating culture in sustainability remains problematic. The findings allow concluding that it could be possible to mainstream across different databases those indicators, which could lead to depicting the overall level of attainment of the Agenda 2030 targets on heritage. However, more research is needed in developing a robust correlation between national datasets and international targets

From Planning to Management of Cult Ural Heritage Sites: Controversies and Conflicts Between Unesco Whl Management Plans and Local Spatial Planning in South-Eastern Sicily

The paper investigates the relationship between the preservation of cultural heritage and planning in UNESCO World Heritage List (WHL) sites, with special reference to the relation between Management Plans and other (local and regional) planning instruments and policies able to influence the promotion of sustainable and responsible development. This will be explored through a case study related to South-Eastern Sicilian UNESCO sites (in particular Syracuse). The analysis of this case study will point out the challenge of integrating different management and planning regimes - which mainly refer to a performative model - in a (still) very conformative planning system. The paper will show how supranational protection tools and models often lose their efficacy in relation to local planning systems

Developing a comparative marine socio-economic framework for the European Atlantic Area

Availability and easy access to a wide range of natural and human-activity data on the oceans and coastal regions of Europe is the basis for strategic decision-making on coastal and marine policy. Strategies within Europe’s Integrated Maritime Policy, including the Maritime Strategy for the Atlantic Area, Blue Growth, Maritime Spatial Planning and Marine Data and Knowledge, require coherent and comparable socio-economic data across European countries. Similarly, the Marine Strategy Framework Directive requires member states to carry out economic and social analysis of their waters and the reformed Common Fisheries Policy includes a social dimension requiring socio-economic data. However, the availability of consistent, accessible marine socio-economic data for the European Atlantic Arc regions is limited. Ocean economy studies have been undertaken in some countries (for example, Ireland, France, and UK) but timescales and methodologies are not necessarily comparable. Marnet is an EU transnational co-operation project involving eight partners from five member states of the Atlantic Area (Ireland, Spain, UK, France and Portugal). Marnet has developed a methodology to collate comparable marine socio-economic data across the Atlantic regions. The comparative marine socio-economic information system developed by Marnet could provide a template for other European States to follow that could potentially facilitate the construction of a Europe-wide marine economic information system as envisaged under the EU Integrated Maritime Policy

Integrated Scenarios of Regional Development in Two Semi-Arid States of North-Eastern Brazil

Scenario analysis of the future is an important tool for supporting sustainability-oriented regional planning. To assist regional planning in two federal states in semi-arid North-eastern Brazil, Ceará and Piauí, we developed integrated qualitative¿quantitative scenarios that show potential developments of the agricultural and water resources situation as well as the internal migration until the year 2025. In these states, regional development is negatively influenced by the high seasonality of rainfall and El-Niño-related drought years. Two reference scenarios, 'Coastal Boom and Cash Crops' and 'Decentralisation - Integrated Rural Development' were developed. First, story lines were created and the development of the driving forces was quantified. Then, an integrated model, which includes modules for simulating water availability, water demand, and agricultural production and income, was applied to compute the temporal development of relevant system indicators in each of the 332 municipalities of Ceará and Piauí. These indicators encompass the fraction of the irrigation water demand than can be satisfied, the volume of water which is stored in the reservoirs at the beginning of the dry season, agricultural productivity and production as well as the internal migration among scenario regions. In addition, the impact of certain policy measures was assessed in the context of both reference scenarios. Reference and intervention scenarios were derived by an interdisciplinary group of scientists and were discussed and refined during policy workshops with planning agencies of Ceará

Recreation, tourism and nature in a changing world : proceedings of the fifth international conference on monitoring and management of visitor flows in recreational and protected areas : Wageningen, the Netherlands, May 30-June 3, 2010

Proceedings of the fifth international conference on monitoring and management of visitor flows in recreational and protected areas : Wageningen, the Netherlands, May 30-June 3, 201