Suchergebnisse

There is currently no legislation at the European level that focuses exclusively on soil conservation. A cross-policy analysis was carried out to identify gaps and overlaps in existing EU legislation that is related to soil threats and functions. We found that three soil threats, namely compaction, salinization and soil sealing, were not addressed in any of the 19 legislative policies that were analyzed. Other soil threats, such as erosion, decline in organic matter, loss of biodiversity and contamination, were covered in existing legislation, but only a few directives provided targets for reducing the soil threats. Existing legislation addresses the reduction of the seven soil functions that were analyzed, but there are very few directives for improving soil functions. Because soil degradation is ongoing in Europe, it raises the question whether existing legislation is sufficient for maintaining soil resources. Addressing soil functions individually in various directives fails to account for the multifunctionality of soil. This paper suggests that a European Soil Framework Directive would increase the effectiveness of conserving soil functions in the EU.

Policy making aims to align agricultural production with multifunctional services such as environmental conservation, rural development, and economic competitiveness. Policies counteract or reinforce external driving forces such as climate change, global economic developments, demography, consumption patterns. They considerably affect decision making of farmers. Because of the interaction and non-linear feedback loops with socio-economic and geophysical processes of the land use systems, policies are difficult to design, and their impacts are difficult to anticipate. The policy making community articulates an emerging demand for science based evidence in support of the policy process. Ex-ante impact assessment of policy making provides the legal basis to fuel scientific evidence into the policy process. For researchers, impact assessment is a means to structure the analysis of human-environment interactions. For policy makers, impact assessment is a means to better target policy decisions towards sustainable development. The integration of both requires a mutual understanding of the respective objectives and operational restrictions within the scientific and policy-making domains. This paper provides insight into the process of policy impact assessment and how research based methods and tools can best feed into it. Three aspects are outlined: the co-design of the assessment between policy makers and researchers; the integration of quantitative analysis with participatory valuation methods; and the robustness and transparency of the analytical methods.

While land serves numerous societal functions and contributes to sustainable development, it is often unclear how these functions are affected by political decisions and common drivers of land use change, such as economic development, climate change and demographic change. This study evaluates alternative land use scenarios in reference to a rural region of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (China), where various processes and decisions have historically triggered unsustainable development. The scientifically tested "Framework for Participatory Impact Assessment (FoPIA)" method is developed further to address specific features of the case study region, and its function as a knowledge-brokerage (KB) tool is evaluated. Three scenarios are developed and analysed in expert workshops. "Land intensification: Agriculture" and "Land intensification: Mining" scenarios are found to have mainly negative environmental and social effects and positive economic impacts, while the "Environmental conservation and tourism" scenario is found to more positively affect all three sustainability dimensions. Assessments of methodological phases show that the FoPIA primarily serves to establish the KB process and that the framework particularly benefits from early examinations of scientific results by policy makers.