A Toolkit for Resilience Evaluation of Land Use Alternatives in a Multifunctional Peri-Urban Landscape

Translating the concept of social-ecological resilience to practical applications in spatial planning remains challenging. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the scientific approach of spatial aspects of social-ecological resilience and adaptive capacity related to bioproductive space, with particular attention to food systems. We define ‘bioproductive space’ as all space providing ecosystem services through primary production processes and includes semi-natural as well as agricultural ecosystems. We argue that bioproductive space is resilient if it continues in delivering similar levels of ecosystem services under changing conditions. A toolkit was developed to explore spatial resilience of bioproductive space. The first stage in the toolkit is a spatially explicit evaluation of various ecosystem services for different land uses. In a second stage, bio-physical and socio-economic drivers or shocks are introduced that can influence the value society attributes to specific ecosystem services. Some of these variations are mostly society driven, e.g. changing bioenergy demand or more restrictive air quality targets. Others are rather driven by biophysical factors, like increasing need for buffering of extreme weather events under the impulse of global change. The third stage of the toolkit takes policy priorities into account. In a final stage, the output of the tool is synthesised by ranking the analysis results for different scnearios and policy priority settings. This toolkit allows spatial planners to explore and evaluate policy decisions against trade-offs between various land use alternatives, while taking ecosystem services into account. The toolkit is applied to a case study to demonstrate its use. Besides the potential for supporting policy makers, the toolkit provides useful feedback for adaptive farm and landscape management.

ISBN:978-3-9503110-9-9

Publication year:2015

Accessibility:Closed