Introduction

2013 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Robert E. Kenward ◽  
Jason Papathanasiou ◽  
Basil Manos ◽  
Stratos Arampatzis
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Decision Support ◽  
Ecosystem Services ◽  
Adaptive Management ◽  
Local Knowledge ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Local Level ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Environmental Assessments

Change in land-use, and hence, biodiversity, result from decisions at local level, which are restrained only in part by formal environmental assessments. However, local knowledge and adaptive management for small de-intensification measures could be mediated by the internet to restore biodiversity and ecosystem services at low cost, by providing decision support to local managers of land and species while also collating their knowledge to guide policy-making. The authors of this chapter introduce four questions that challenge the development of suitable internet systems and which this project seeks to answer.

scholarly journals Internet resource of the land fund at a local level in the light of the land reform іn Ukraine

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Local Level ◽  
General Information ◽  
Civil Servants ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Internet Resource ◽  
Internet Resources ◽  
Village Council ◽  
Local Residents ◽  
The Village

The purpose of this article. is to highlight theoretical principles of creating an Internet resource of the land fund in Stepnohirsk village council, Zaporizhzhia region for streamlining information about the structure and peculiarities of land use within it. The main material. The issue of land registration and monitoring does not apply to the land cadastre and is often presented on the isolated portals in the Internet resources of the leading European and American countries, connected with the land fund. At the same time, there is no specialized resource where all information about land would be collected. As such a resource, the most expedient way is to develop the Internet resource of a land fund for a separate village council (territorial community) as a territory corresponding to the primary collection of factual data on quantitative- qualitative land characteristics. Within our research, such internet resource was created for Stepnohirsk Village Council Vasylivsky District of Zaporizhzhia region. The interface menu includes the following components: main, administration, land fund, settlements, land monitoring, regulatory framework, announcements, photo gallery, as well as two personal cabinets – that of a user and a civil servant. The content part of the created Internet resource includes general information about settlements and adjoining territories, legislative acts, an interactive map showing the prevalent natural or man-made disadvantages and information about the land fund. One of the main internet resources is an Internet reception (a component of the user’s personal cabinet), where the user can write a formal request to the village council and register for the reception. Its purpose is to establish communication between civil servants. The user can work with documents, save them, print, mark (but only copies that have been saved), emphasize markers, and forward them to other users. This will help the village council workers to put new points to monitor or verify, to mark a certain object on the map. Conclusions and further research. Creation of an Internet resource of the land fund of the village council will allow: a) to systematize information about the structure of the land fund and peculiarities of its use within the village council; b) implement an operational update of available data and monitor land resources in real time; c) to establish informational interaction between public services and local residents, including in relation to the issues of priority land use tasks that require urgent resolution. The perspective is realization of the opportunity for civil servants to have an electronic archive of documents and for local residents – to order information about the history of a separate land plot.

scholarly journals The Suitability of the Ecosystem Services Framework for Guiding Benefit Assessments in Human-Modified Landscapes Exemplified by Regulated Watersheds - Implications for a Sustainable Approach

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 1821 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingrid Nesheim ◽  
Line Barkved
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Land Use ◽  
Ecosystem Services ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Qualitative Assessment ◽  
Study Approach ◽  
Societal Welfare ◽  
Hydropower Production ◽  
Sustainability Concept ◽  
Land Use Functions

To support decision-making, benefit assessments have become an obligatory part of natural resource management. In this context, the ecosystem services (ES) framework has been widely adopted for identifying and assessing the values at stake, yet the concept ignores benefits from water and land use functions as important contributions for societal welfare. This paper aims to contribute knowledge for improved benefit assessments in human-modified landscapes, exemplified by watersheds regulated for the production of hydropower. Through a case study approach in two regulated watersheds in Norway, beneficiaries’ perceptions of the benefits associated with key watershed activities, i.e., hydropower production, kayaking, angling, and hiking, are presented. Considering the beneficiaries’ perspectives, we discuss the relative ability of economic, quantitative, and qualitative assessment methods to present benefits. The study shows that benefit assessments must be carried out on different scales of governance, as benefits are context and scale dependent. We argue for an approach which considers a balance of benefits obtained from ecosystem services, and from water and land use functions within ecological limits. The suitability of the ES framework for guiding benefit assessments in a human-modified landscape and its complementarity with the sustainability concept for informing local-level decision-making are discussed.

scholarly journals Integration of Ecosystem Services and Green and Blue Infrastructures Concepts in the Land Use Planning Process: The Coimbra Case Study

Proceedings ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 90
Author(s):  
Luís Valença Pinto ◽  
Carla Sofia Santos Ferreira ◽  
Paulo Pereira ◽  
Sander Jacobs ◽  
Ieva Misiune ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Ecosystem Services ◽  
Land Use Planning ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Conservation Status ◽  
National Level ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Current Status ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Eu

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) initiated in 2001 aims to assess the impacts of human pressure on ecosystem services (ES) and human well-being. Since then, the ES have been a worldwide concern, namely regarding to biodiversity loss and land use management (MA, 2005). The EU 2010 Biodiversity Baseline Report stated that 65% of habitats of EU importance were in an unfavorable conservation status, mainly due to anthropic activities over time (EEA, 2010). As a consequence, in 2011, the EU adopted the Biodiversity Strategy to 2020, requiring all Member States to actively work towards stopping the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services by 2020, and to restore ecosystems. ES are particularly relevant in urban areas, where most population is concentrated and expected to reach almost 70% of the total population by 2050 (UN-DESA, 2018). Strategically planned urban Green and Blue Infrastructures (GBI) can be designed and implemented in cities to effectively provide a wide range of ES, relevant to address urban sustainability and resilience to climate change, and thus effectively contribute to stop and revert ES deterioration and loss. However, the integration of ES and GBI concepts into national, regional and local policies and plans, and their effectiveness to implement the EU Biodiversity Strategy, is still a major challenge. This paper aims to analyze the horizontal and vertical integration of the ES and GBI concepts in the Portuguese policies and land use planning, at national, regional and local levels, focusing on the municipality of Coimbra. Among the 19 documents analyzed, most of them are defined at national level (12) and 6 of them are defined at local level. At the regional level, only one single plan is available, although it is still not officially approved and published, despite started being prepared in 1991. This regional situation mirrors the current status of the Portuguese administrative levels, which was triggered by the negative result of the 1998 referendum on the regionalization process. This referendum prevented necessary changes in the administrative divisions, so that current regional divisions do not reflect the economic, demographic and cultural realities of the country, having been emptied of administrative powers. The analysis shows a strong integration of the ES and GBI concepts at the national level, but the vertical coordination shows that plenty of work needs to be done to fully embrace the ES and GBI concepts. This research was performed in the UrbanGaia project, funded through the ERA-net BiodivERsA 3 2015 call under grants BRAIN-be BR/175/A1/URBANGAIA-BE (Belgium); 01LC1616A (Germany); S-BIODIVERSA-17-17-1 (Lithuania), and BIODIVERSA/0008/2015 (Portugal).

scholarly journals Multicriteria decision-support system to assess the potential of exclosure-based conservation in Ethiopia

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kefyalew Sahle Kibret ◽  
Amare Haileslassie ◽  
Wolde Mekuria Bori ◽  
Petra Schmitter
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Decision Support ◽  
Ecosystem Services ◽  
Land Degradation ◽  
Decision Support Tool ◽  
River Basins ◽  
Land Area ◽  
Support Tool ◽  
Ex Ante ◽  
Multicriteria Decision Support

Abstract Land degradation is a global challenge that affects lives and livelihoods in many communities. Since 1950, about 65% of Africa's cropland, on which millions of people depend, has been affected by land degradation caused by mining, poor farming practices and illegal logging. One-quarter of the land area of Ethiopia is severely degraded. As part of interventions to restore ecosystem services, exclosures have been implemented in Ethiopia since the 1980s. But the lack of tools to support prioritization and more efficient targeting of areas for large-scale exclosure-based interventions remains a challenge. Within that perspective, the overarching objectives of the current study were: (i) to develop a Geographic Information System-based multicriteria decision-support tool that would help in the identification of suitable areas for exclosure initiatives; (ii) to provide spatially explicit information, aggregated by river basin and agroecology, on potential areas for exclosure interventions and (iii) to conduct ex-ante analysis of the potential of exclosure areas for improving ecosystem services in terms of increase in above-ground biomass (AGB) production and carbon storage. The results of this study demonstrated that as much as 10% of Ethiopia's land area is suitable for establishing exclosures. This amounts to 11 million hectares (ha) of land depending on the criteria used to define suitability for exclosure. Of this total, a significant proportion (0.5–0.6 million ha) is currently under agricultural land-use systems. In terms of propriety river basins, we found that the largest amount of suitable area for exclosures falls in the Abay (2.6 million ha) and Tekeze (2.2 million ha) river basins, which are hosts to water infrastructure such as hydropower dams and are threatened by siltation. Ex-ante analysis of ecosystem services indicated that about 418 million tons of carbon can be stored in the AGB through exclosure land use. Ethiopia has voluntarily committed to the Bonn Challenge to restore 15 million ha of degraded land by 2025. The decision-support tool developed by the current study and the information so generated go toward supporting the planning, implementation and monitoring of these kinds of local and regional initiatives.

scholarly journals The Convention to Combat Desertification and the Role of Innovative Policy-Making Discourses: The Case of Burkina Faso

2004 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 107-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Bruyninckx
Keyword(s):  
Policy Implementation ◽  
Burkina Faso ◽  
Local Knowledge ◽  
Policy Process ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Local Level ◽  
National Level ◽  
Agenda 21 ◽  
The Impact

The UN Convention to Combat Desertification is a mix of traditional regime elements with a set of innovations. These innovative elements can be interpreted as emanations of policy discourses that have been gaining in importance since the introduction and the fairly broad acceptance of sustainable development and Agenda 21 as guiding conceptual frameworks. In this article I first elaborate on three of those discourses: the participatory, the decentralization and the local knowledge discourses. In a second part, I will look at Burkina Faso as an example of UNCCD policy implementation at the national and the local level (Yatenga region). It will become clear that although changes are visible in policy-making dynamics, major difficulties and obstacles remain. The CCD undeniably has an impact at the national level of policy-making. It has provided support for decentralization, for more participatory processes of policy-making and for the inclusion of local knowledge in the policy process. At the more decentralized level the impact is less clear and more difficult to distinguish.

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