A3. Defining a safe operating space for the future development of European agricultural landscapes

Felix Herzog (Agroscope), felix.herzog@agroscope.admin.ch

Sonja Kay (Agroscope)

Florian Danzinger (University of Vienna)

Peter Zander (Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research)

Johannes Schuler (Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research)

Thomas Wrbka (University of Vienna)

Kalev Sepp (University of Tartu)

Summary

European agricultural landscapes are changing, often with significant environmental costs for ecosystem services (ESS) and for biodiversity. To protect these and improve the adaptive capacity of the agro-ecological system to changing land use, region-specific ecological infrastructures need to be identified and (policy) instruments must be put in place to maintain them. The symposium seeks contributions on how a safe operating space for the future development of agricultural landscapes can be identified. This will include production perspectives, their ecological impacts, and barriers to implementing biodiversity and ESS protection policies.

Description

The management of biodiversity and ecosystem services (ESS) in agricultural landscapes must take into account agricultural land use, landscape structures and relevant stakeholders. Agricultural activities affect the environment and continuously adapt to e.g. economic incentives, scientific and technological developments, socio-political frameworks, climate change, etc. The relative importance of those drivers varies regionally. Because maintaining biodiversity in agricultural landscapes is essential to sustaining their functionality and adaptive capacity, a landscape-scale view of the agricultural system is needed to safeguard ecological infrastructure, associated farmland biodiversity, and its functions (ESS) under current and future drivers.

To address those questions, the European research project SALBES (Scenarios for Agricultural Landscapes' Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) applies the planetary boundary framework to define a safe operating space (Steffen et al., 2015). It is tested as a guideline for policy making to steer the development of agricultural landscapes, and as a theory and concept, based on integrated, stakeholder guided, evidence-based analyses. The approach is tested in four European case study areas. We hypothesize that the integration of three components is essential to safeguard the functionality of biodiversity and ESS in agricultural landscapes: The green landscape infrastructure, adaptive management, and multi-actor approaches.

Against this background, this session provides a platform for presenting similar approaches and other scenario building and modelling tools that tackle these issues at the landscape level. We invite presentations focussing on environmental policy making and management principles for agricultural landscapes.

Impact

The potential for a series of research articles in special journal issue will be explored.