The main focus is on the understanding of land systems as socio-ecological systems in which land use and land cover are the result of dynamic interactions of humans with their environment.
Below an overview
Envision (financed by BiodivERsA) aims at more inclusive approaches to protected area management that enhance the conservation and well-being values of protected areas and provide for multiple community and industry needs. This is operationalized by developing mixed-method, participatory scenario planning tools and processes for identifying, assessing and balancing multiple community and industry groups’ visions for the management of protected areas in Europe and the United States beyond 2020, including their consequences on human well-being and the conservation of biodiversity and ecosystems services. We will use these results to make evidence-based recommendations to protected area managers operating at local, national and international scales in order to inform post-2020 biodiversity policy, particularly on protected areas management. Within the project IVM will address how land management impacts ecosystem services, biodiversity, and human well-being in different ways. Trade-offs have to be navigated carefully as win-wins are not necessarily available. However, how to navigate such trade-offs through land management is unclear. In the work package under responsibility of IVM we will not only discuss the visions of development of the area with stakeholders, but also use simulation models to quantify the impacts of these visions in terms of impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Stakeholder discussions will be informed by these simulation results to find the most optimal and acceptable ways to navigate the trade-offs or clarify why it is necessary to implement certain management decisions that implicitly embed trade-offs.
The LandSense Citizen Observatory aims to aggregate innovative EO technologies, mobile devices, community-based environmental monitoring, data collection, interpretation and information delivery systems to empower communities to monitor and report on their environment. A number of key characteristics fundamental to the LandSense Citizen Observatory include:
A key component of the project is the LandSense Engagement Platform. Various communities will be able to actively participate within the LandSense engagement platform through a variety of interactive tools and functions to facilitate information transfer, assessment, valuation, uptake and exploitation of environmental data and results. The platform will offer collaborative mapping functionalities to allow citizens to view, analyze and share data collected from different campaigns and create their own maps, individually and collaboratively. In addition, citizens can participate in ongoing LandSense demonstration cases using their own devices (e.g. mobile phones and tablets), through interactive reporting and gaming applications, as well as launching their own campaigns.
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In the past years, IVM has been consulting the European Environment Agency on a wide variety of topics related to land use in the European Union. Recently, IVM analysed how well irrigation is captured on European land use products and what are the potential mismatches in different datasets. Currently, IVM is preparing a EU wide map on livestock grazing, to support the management of high nature value areas in the European Union.
Contact information: Dr Jasper van Vliet and Dr Žiga Malek.
Human consumption of food and agricultural products has a significant impact on the environment and the societies in the regions where they are produced. Given Europe’s large and growing land-use footprint abroad, Europe has a special responsibility to develop concepts and tools needed to achieve sustainability in an interconnected world. Different sectors, consumers, businesses and politicians are increasingly demanding more environmental and social sustainable land use both inside and outside Europe.
IVM, together with the Bern University of Applied Sciences, is analysing potential climate change impacts on Fairtrade producers. Specifically, we try to understand predicted climate change impacts on specific regions and commodities and map the ‘climate change hotspots’ within the Fairtrade producers’ network.
Combining a set of different climate change projections we analyse potential effects of climate change on main Fairtrade commodities: banana, cocoa, coffee, cotton, sugarcane and tea. We first performed a literature review to identify the main observed and expected climate change impacts, We then use global projections to identify areas, where Fairtrade crops are currently sourced, that will experience considerable changes to temperature and rainfall extremes. This way, we identify the extent to which over 1.5 million farmers all around the world might be impacted by future climate change. Finally, we identify priority areas for future adaptation to climate change, such as improving drainage, equipping fields with irrigation, or establishing shaded production areas.
Contact information: Dr Žiga Malek and Prof. Peter Verburg.
Provision of public goods by Europe’s rural landscapes is challenged by trade-offs between environmental performance and farm profitability, the time lag between action and impact, and the potential mismatch between the scales of actions and effects. As a result, several public goods, such as water and air quality, control of soil erosion, carbon sequestration, animal and plant biodiversity and recreation are characterised by under-provision. CONSOLE aims to boost delivery of public goods by EU agriculture and forestry. To do so, CONSOLE aims at designing and testing effective and efficient contracts for the provision of public goods.
Contact information: Dr Nynke Schulp and Kina Harmanny.
More information: https://console-project.eu
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a comprehensive set of targets for humanity, and progress towards each of the SDG is considered a positive development. Some SDG can be considered synergetic when progress towards one SDG yields additional benefits towards another SDG. However, in other cases progress towards one SDG might cause trade-offs by limiting the progress towards another SDG, which is not unlikely in a world of limited resources. In this project we will assess how and to what extent improvements towards food and nutrition security (SDG2) is associated with synergies and trade-offs with poverty reduction (SDG1), health (SDG3), climate change (SDG13), and biodiversity (SDG15). The main aim of this project is to analyse how and to what extent developments towards SDG2 (End hunger) in South-East Asia yields synergies and trade-offs with other SDGs, and how policy measures can improve the outcomes of such interaction. The geographical focus of this project is on Lao PDR and Myanmar, two developing countries in Southeast Asia where hunger is still prevalent in many locations.
Project website: sdgfood.environmentalgeography.nl
The project addresses the challenge of securing food production while still supporting ecosystem services provision and biodiversity conservation by agricultural land. A key aim of the TALE project was the assessment of relevance of existing measures and payments (and conditions for receiving these payments) for biodiversity, targeted land use and selected Ecosystem Services. To do so, research was oriented to the disentanglement and quantification of the multifaceted links between agricultural production, biodiversity and ecosystem services in different European landscapes. Results must be used to support the design and evaluation of policy options particularly regarding the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) that can help to reconcile conflicting demands, namely the production of agricultural commodities while at the same time ensuring the provision of ESS and conservation of biodiversity. The project is innovative in the sense that it provides conclusions on how to bring optimization into practice.
Contact information: Prof. Peter Verburg
More information: http://tale.environmentalgeography.nl/
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