Optimising rural land health: From landscape policy to community land use decision-making: Fid-Bau Portal

Optimising rural land health: From landscape policy to community land use decision-making

Meyer, Burghard Christian / Phillips, Alistair / Annett, Shayne

Implementation of sustainable landscape policy directions can be held back by various constraints. These limitations may include: an absence of reliable integrated landscape character predictions, unproductive tensions arising from poorly informed public and institutional debate, low levels of political resolve due to uncertainty, and limitations on program and project design due to either inadequate availability, or ineffective use of ecological and social data. The need for new methodologies to speed the attainment of sustainable land use is pressing when considered in the context of information indicating that the condition of the world's ecosystems remains in decline. This decline is measurable by the changes in ecosystem services. Taking an ecosystem services view offers an opportunity to address some of the limitations noted earlier. The ecosystem services concept links natural resource management more clearly to the broader functionality of natural systems. Ecosystem services like clean water, productive soils and distinct flora and fauna are generated or maintained by healthy functioning ecosystems. Dwelling on these services and the practices that alter them defines the reasons for natural resource management. Modelling these ecosystems and their services is the key way to understanding these relationships. The utilisation of land use modelling methods to inform, and be informed by community and stakeholder landscape preferences, represents a potential step forward in the evolution of approaches to deliver sustainable landscape policy objectives. This paper presents a summary of examples of a multi-criteria land use optimisation technique that has been used to envision land use combinations most likely to achieve sustainable landscapes in Germany. A number of the sustainable landscape principles arising from Victoria's rural land stewardship project, such as use of an ecosystem services framework to better inform long-term land use planning along with calls to better connect community input to landscape function and land use decisions, are also considered.