Landschapsbeleid in Noordwest-Europa

Dit artikel (Alterra) geeft een overzicht van ervaringen in een aantal omringende landen met de ontwikkeling en uitvoering van landschapsbeleid op nationaal en regionaal niveau. Het betreft: Duitsland (Noordrijn-Westfalen), Engeland, Frankrijk, België (Vlaanderen) en Nederlan

SUSMETRO : Impact Assessment Tools for Food Planning in Metropolitan Regions : IA tools and serious gaming in support of sustainability targets for food planning, nature conservation and recreation

By offering a series of decision support tools for stakeholders of metropolitan regions, SUSMETRO facilitates and enables evidence-based decision making by means of ‘serious gaming’. Making use of the Phase 1 thematic maps such as on agricultural competitiveness, nature conservation and recreational values, stakeholders can compare impacts of traditional versus innovative forms of agricultural production. The SUSMETRO Impact Assessment tool provides information on the expected effects of spatial planning with regard to the self-supportive capacities of the region (ecological footprint) and the share of recreational and nature conservation facilities (land use functions), offering cost-benefit calculations regarding the expected economic revenues. The whole process is embedded in a Landscape Character Assessment process and guided by Knowledge Brokerage procedures to strengthen the science-policy interface. In sum, the SUSMETRO approach allows a wide range of stakeholders to co-develop images for sustainable Metropolitan Agriculture

Overview on agricultural landscape indicators across OECD countries

With the development of both a conceptual framework and the identification of practical indicator for assessing agricultural impacts on landscapes, the OECD has initiated an operational approach for measuring changes in the structure, management and values of landscapes with clear orientation towards political and economic targets. From this perspective, landscape functions and values are not longer considered to be by-products of coincidental bio-physical conditions and management regimes, but are interpreted as conscious societal demands towards the supplier or producer ¿ namely the local farmer. The paper intends to use the existing experiences of OECD countries for identifying the main directions in landscape indicator research and application with regard to the overall objectives, namely a consistent and operational indicator assessment that allows comparing the impact of agriculture on the landscapes throughout all OECD countries. In order to provide the reader with some points of references, the paper starts off by reviewing the implementation targets for OECD landscape indicators on the basis of recognised landscape definitions and projects with special attention to current experiences in Landscape Character Assessments and the development of national and international landscape typologies. Drawing upon the references provided in the fist part, a comparative analysis of landscape indicator assessments deriving from selected examples from OECD countries provides the basis for final conclusions and recommendation

Sustainable Design Principles for Refugee Camps

This report’s main focus is on the phenomenon of refugee camps as one of the most visible and spatially explicit results of refuge and migration movements at the global scale. Given the steadily growing numbers of people on the move and staying in temporary homes and settlements, refugee camps must be considered as a form of highly dynamic and partially ad hoc urbanisation processes. International organizations such as UNHCR, Red Cross, AWH and others are playing a key role in providing strategic, organizational and practical support for the establishment and management of refugee camps. Their experience, dedication, tacit knowledge, technical guidance and cooperation-lines with national governments are of utmost importance for the future of refugees as well as for the situation of host countries and regions where camps and settlement are being set up. While the emphasis is on establishing temporary solutions and to discourage permanent settlements, fact is that many refugee camps last several years or even decades and are – despite international efforts – steadily growing in terms of size and population figures with severe impacts on regional sustainability

Metropolitan Foodsheds as Spatial References for a Landscape-Based Assessment of Regional Food Supply

The Food Planning and Innovation for Sustainable Metropolitan Regions (FOODMETRES) project strives to assess the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of food chains, with regard to the spatial, logistical, and resource dimensions of growing food as well as the questions of food safety and quality as key assets for food planning and governance. Recognizing that food production and consumption are not only linked via food chains in a physical–logistic way, but above all via value chains of social acceptance, FoodMetres is designed to combine quantitative and evidence-based research principles with qualitative and discursive methods, in order to address the wider dimensions of food chains in the context of metropolitan agro-systems. One of the research assets is to assess the location and amount of agriculturally productive land within reach of urban centers, to supply metropolitan populations with regionally grown food. For this purpose, we have developed an accessibility approach that is specifically designed to examine the potential of Metropolitan Agro-Food Systems (MAS) to feed urban populations. Taking into account data on transport infrastructure and land cover as well as the protection status of land, this paper highlights the results for the test cases of Ljubljana, Berlin, London, Milano, and Rotterdam

The EU societal awareness of landscape indicator: a review of its meaning, utility and performance across different scales

There is increasing recognition that agricultural landscapes meet multiple societal needs and demands beyond provision of economic and environmental goods and services. Accordingly, there have been significant calls for the inclusion of societal, amenity and cultural values in agri-environmental landscape indicators to assist policy makers in monitoring the wider impacts of land-based policies. However, capturing the amenity and cultural values that rural agrarian areas provide, by use of such indicators, presents significant challenges. The EU social awareness of landscape indicator represents a new class of generalized social indicator using a top-down methodology to capture the social dimensions of landscape without reference to the specific structural and cultural characteristics of individual landscapes. This paper reviews this indicator in the context of existing agri-environmental indicators and their differing design concepts. Using a stakeholder consultation approach in five case study regions, the potential and limitations of the indicator are evaluated, with a particular focus on its perceived meaning, utility and performance in the context of different user groups and at different geographical scales. This analysis supplements previous EU-wide assessments, through regional scale assessment of the limitations and potentialities of the indicator and the need for further data collection. The evaluation finds that the perceived meaning of the indicator does not vary with scale, but in common with all mapped indicators, the usefulness of the indicator, to different user groups, does change with scale of presentation. This indicator is viewed as most useful when presented at the scale of governance at which end users operate. The relevance of the different sub-components of the indicator are also found to vary across regions