Visions Of LAnd use Transitions in Europe

Client: European Commission (FP7)
Period: 2010-2015
Scope: Collaborative project, Integrated resource management based on land and land-use management 

THE CHALLENGE
The world is a changing environment.
Land use transitions will occur in an ever increasing pace, answering changing conditions of global market and society. Sound management of energy sources, climate adaptation and mitigation, and changing urban-rural relationships will all have large, hardly predictable impacts on land use. European Policy is therefore confronted with the need to develop visions of managing these land use transitions in a responsible way.

PROJECT OBJECTIVES
Sound policies for future land use require informed visions.
Objective of VOLANTE is to provide European policy and land management with clear visions how to reduce the large variation in possible land use scenarios for the future to a manageable set. Land system science represents the unifying research direction integrating the many disciplines needed to inform these visions.

Critical thresholds are associated with crucial points of no return; they help to explore the means to prevent ending up in these points. VOLANTE will therefore  identify policy options for the various landscapes of Europe and for shorter and longer term perspectives. The consequences of these policies in terms of providing landscape and ecosystem goods and services will be object of a comprehensive evaluation. Prominent decision makers and stakeholders will interactively discuss the conclusions of this evaluation, leading to a Roadmap for Future Land Resources Management in Europe
 

METHODOLOGY
To realise this, VOLANTE is designed in three Modules  to gain better understanding of the PROCESSES underpinning land use change in Europe, to exploit ASSESSMENT tools that are capable of identifying critical pathways for land management in a variety of environmental and management regimes across Europe, and to develop VISIONS on the role of land management.

VOLANTE brings together researchers with experience and expertise on land use change at various spatial and temporal scales enabling a focus on vision development. Module PROCESSES identifies land use change  and the processes causing these, testing unproven hypotheses by extensively using the experience gained in earlier projects and studying crucial missing links. Problem orientation is the basis for the Module ASSESSMENT which will narrow down the infinite spectrum of policy decisions possible. Module VISIONS establishes interaction with decision makers at regional and European level, to enhance an evidence based and problem oriented science-policy interface. A special, professional and consistent effort will be made to gather the views of a broad set of stakeholders and to include them in all steps of the process.

EXPECTED RESULTS
A new vision on land management
VOLANTE aims to develop a new European land management paradigm, providing  an integrated conceptual and operational platform which allows policy makers to develop pro-active and context-sensitive solutions to the challenges for the future, rather than to react on largely autonomous external land systems developments.