Pan-European Biological and Landscape Diversity Strategy

The Action Plan on European Landscapes is part of the Pan-European Biological and Landscape Diversity Strategy (PEBLDS)(Council of Europe, UNEP & ECNC, 1995) that has been signed by 55 European countries and is presently under implementation. The central objective of Action Theme 4 is to actively promote the landscape concept as an opportunity to address all those pressing landscape issues which are complimentary to, but - at the European level - not sufficiently affected by, classical nature conservation approaches. Rather than being limited to area protection, the landscape concept offers integrative, preventive and pro-active tools to counter-act multi-dimensional environmental pressures and to initiate large-scale mitigation and restoration processes. AT4 is hence designed to respond to the following needs: a sound, transparent and scientifically stable methodology for describing and assessing the distribution, values, and land use aspects as driving forces and trends of landscapes of European importance on the base of European-wide developed and agreed-upon criteria (landscape indicators). The Action Plan is implemented under the lead of PEBLDS's Focal Point for Action Theme 4 on landscapes, namely the Council of Europe and the European Centre for Nature Conservation. The Action Plan specifies projects and actions on developing a European Landscape Map, identifying landscape assessment criteria, analysing future trends and opportunities and initiating awareness campaigns as well as policy debates. Since the implementation begun, reports on landscape assessment (Klijn et al, 1999), progress on the landscape map (Vervloet, 2000) and a European Workshop on 'Landscape & Sustainability (Wascher, 2000) have been completed.