While the European Landscape Convention (ELC) has attracted attention from the sciences, policy makers and the general public to the nature of cultural landscapes, more needs to be done to implement it.
Read more »The HERCULES project would like to announce the launch of HERCULES Labs, our new online tool for the landscape community to browse and share ideas about good practices in landscape management. A key objective of the HERCULES project is to strengthen the collaborative network of the landscape community. One way to do this is through the collection and dissemination of good landscape practices. We have developed an online tool called HERCULES Labs where members of the landscape community, be they practitioners, policy makers or scientists, can view a diverse range of good practices and initiatives that we have already gathered in our work, as well as add their own ideas and perspectives.
Read more »Can Landscape Stewardship really include restoration? Even more the concept of novel systems and their management? The upcoming workshops on the implementation of the European Landscape Convention in October have the sub-title “the landscape knows no boundaries”. That is true, but it is as true in time as it is in space, and that’s where restoration, and management of novelty, become important….
Read more »Green Week 2015 (www.greenweek2015.eu) in Brussels – the large annual conference on European environmental policy – was accompanied by the second EU-level workshop of our HERCULES project. This workshop addressed a central issue of the project: The emergence of collaborative approaches to landscape stewardship across Europe. Together with around 50 participants from the European institutions, government agencies, NGOs, businesses, and academia, we intended (1) to explore the characteristics of landscape stewardship initiatives in Europe and their contributions to sustainable land management, (2) to discuss the role of landscape stewardship in EU rural development policies, and (3) to examine how Europe could contribute towards making innovative models of landscape stewardship more effective. So what did we learn? Here are my random thoughts:
Read more »Many rural landscapes are shaped by centuries of agricultural land use. As agricultural land use practices change, landscapes transform. In fact, transformation is a key-characteristic of any agricultural landscape. Most of these transformations occur without major notice. Others, however, are perceived as unwelcome and result in requests for landscape stewardship interventions. But who is responsible for defining the stewardship goals and the interventions needed for agricultural landscapes, for implementing and bearing the extra efforts or forgone profits?
Read more »Our seas and coasts are an asset with rich and varied resources, living and non-living, which support livelihoods, provide a sense of place and identity and define cultures. Degradation of coral reef ecosystems, overfishing, increased resource extraction - the need for improved stewardship of coastal and marine resources is increasingly evident around the globe. But what does marine and coastal stewardship mean and how can we apply stewardship in these environments?
Read more »Citizen science has played an increasingly important role in recent decades as the top-down approach to natural resource management has been rejected due to its social, environmental, and economical unsustainability. An alternative approach to top-down management that recognizes community stewards and citizen science programs as valuable partners in management and regulatory decision-making is recommended in the literature as a best practice in resource management, and the significance of its emerging role highlighted. This shift is reflected globally through policy initiatives of the United Nations such as Agenda 21 or the Aarhus Convention, which emphasized that the environmental challenges faced by societies worldwide cannot be dealt with by public authorities alone.
Read more »As society seeks to meet the needs of a growing human population and rising aspirations for economic consumption, there has been a corresponding global decline in biodiversity and other benefits that society receives from ecosystems. These changes have accelerated over the last sixty years and may be approaching or exceeding the limits of tolerable environmental change. Given the extensive nature and difficulty of regulating these changes, the rules that govern society’s relationship with the biosphere must be radically redefined in order to promote a healthy and sustainable human-earth relationship.
Read more »A defining feature of integrated landscape management is long-term multi-stakeholder partnership among different groups of land managers and resource users. Agreeing on and sustaining good landscape stewardship at scale builds on effective partnerships at multiple levels. These ideas are not new, and thousands of landscape initiatives are underway today around the world based on multi-stakeholder partnership models. Methods and tools have been developed to support partners who come from very different perspectives to collaboratively assess their landscapes, negotiate priority objectives, design strategies and interventions, sustain partnership processes and monitor for adaptive management. Policymakers at national and international levels are beginning to recognize the value of landscape partnerships, with their focus on local development, social, environmental and cultural priorities, for shaping high-level strategies to achieve national goals and ensure we live within planetary ecosystem boundaries.
Read more »A while ago, the HERCULES project was endorsed by the ICSU/UNESCO-Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS) a global initiative to strengthen place-based, long-term social–ecological case studies. As a contribution to a special issue on PECS in “Ecology & Society”, the HERCULES partners have reflected on the contributions of cultural landscape research to the study of ecosystem change and society.
Read more »Our landscapes; our privilege; our responsibility. This is, simply put, the concept of landscape stewardship. As the word itself suggests, a stewardship approach implies that we manage our landscapes and the resources contained therein not only assuming that we have rights (typical of owners) but also on a realization that we have corresponding duties (typical of caretakers). It is an approach fundamentally based on several core tenets of sustainability, intra and intergenerational equity, inclusiveness, and the safeguarding of critical ecosystem services among them.
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