Suchergebnisse

Indicators in the field of bio-diversity and landscape are applied on various levels, including the continental field as well as the individual agricultural enterprise. Apart from the ecological evaluation of agricultural enterprises and agrarian policy measures, indicators are also used in environmental reporting and evaluation as well as in planning or simulation models in administrative and scientific fields. Already for longer period of time, indicators have been used as assessment criteria in landscape planning to support decisions regarding land use. Due to the standards the EU commission requires from the member states in this regard, the application of indicators to assess the effects of agri-environment programs have gained prominence. The EU requires proof of the achievement of the promotion aims such as soil (erosion, nutrients, plant-protective agents), water, bio-diversity and landscape (EU/VO 12004/00). This commitment can be met by means of a functioning environmental reporting. However, only an insufficient number of suitable indicators exist in the fields of bio-diversity and landscape. In a bottom-up approach, control systems to assess ecological farming achieved on an operational level for a future development were recently developed. Here, a future development is seen in the alignment referring to results or goals, respectively, and in the regionalisation. The article gives an overview of the indicator application on different spatial levels and for different purposes.

As the world's largest payments for ecosystem services (PES) program, China's Sloping Land Conversion Program (SLCP) is designed to combat soil erosion and land degradation by converting cropland on steep slopes into forests. Operating through an incentive-based approach, the SLCP involved 32 million rural households as core agents. This paper aims to fill a research gap regarding how socioeconomic and institutional conditions influence rural households to reach the primary environmental goals. Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), we conclude that at the household level, the different pathways to environmental success or failure have been shaped by socioeconomic and institutional conditions in a combinatory manner rather than single conditions alone. Specifically, the combination of household involvement and effective monitoring plays a fundamental role in capacity-building between government and households. We found that financial incentives have a trade-off effect, as they could not only create a positive interaction but also trigger failure in situations with different conditions. Finally, the potential and limits of QCA were discussed, and we call for a more serious reflection on the added value of QCA as an alternative or complementary method to conventional approaches in environmental governance research.

Diese Dissertation identifiziert und adressiert Fragen der Forschung bezüglich der Erfassung von Ökosystemleistungen, um Entscheidungen für eine nachhaltige Landnutzung unter Einfluss des Klimawandels zu informieren. Trotz des zunehmenden Fokus der Umweltwissenschaften auf Ökosystemleistungen gibt es wenige Hinweise darauf, wie wissenschaftliche Informationen zu Ökosystemleistungen tatsächlich auch Entscheidungen informieren. Dies wirft Fragen auf, ob die Forschung zu Ökosystemleistungen das Ziel erreicht, Entscheidungen zu informieren. Diese Dissertation adressiert diese Frage auf nationaler und internationaler Ebene und gibt Einblicke zu: 1) der Verfügbarkeit von Studien zur monetären Bewertung von Ökosystemleistungen in Deutschland und deren Eignung über mögliche Kosten durch den Verlust von Ökosystemleistungen zu informieren; 2) konzeptionellen Überlegungen für problemorientierten Ökosystemleistungsanalysen, welche Entscheidungen besser informieren können; 3) Faktoren, welche die Kohlenstoffleistung von Projekten zur Reduzierung von Emissionen durch Entwaldung und Walddegradation (REDD+) bestimmen.

This Special Feature gathers the results of five research projects funded by the 7th Research Framework Program of the European Union and aims to identify successful cases of community-based management of environmental challenges in Latin America. The funding scheme, Research for the benefit of Civil Society Organizations, fostered innovative research approaches between civil society and research organizations. More than 20 field sites have been explored, and issues such as trade-offs between conservation and development, scientific versus local knowledge, social learning, ecosystem services, community owned solutions, scaling-up and scalingout strategies, the influence of context and actors in effective environmental management and governance, and the conflicts of interests around natural resources have been addressed. Based on our experiences as project coordinators, in this editorial we reflect on some of the important lessons gained for research praxis and impact, focusing on knowledge of governance models and their scaling-out and scaling-up, and on methods and tools to enable action research at the science–civil society interface. The results highlight the richness of community-based management experiences that exist in Latin America and the diversity of approaches to encourage the sustainable community-based management of environmental challenges.

This Special Feature gathers the results of five research projects funded by the 7th Research Framework Program of the European Union and aims to identify successful cases of community-based management of environmental challenges in Latin America. The funding scheme, Research for the benefit of Civil Society Organizations, fostered innovative research approaches between civil society and research organizations. More than 20 field sites have been explored, and issues such as trade-offs between conservation and development, scientific versus local knowledge, social learning, ecosystem services, community owned solutions, scaling-up and scaling-out strategies, the influence of context and actors in effective environmental management and governance, and the conflicts of interests around natural resources have been addressed. Based on our experiences as project coordinators, in this editorial we reflect on some of the important lessons gained for research praxis and impact, focusing on knowledge of governance models and their scaling-out and scaling-up, and on methods and tools to enable action research at the science–civil society interface. The results highlight the richness of community-based management experiences that exist in Latin America and the diversity of approaches to encourage the sustainable community-based management of environmental challenges.

In this milestone report, we explain how we have developed public goods games to perform an exante assessment of novel collective contract models in the Contracts2.0 project. Workshops were conducted in Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Poland. The first data collection was completed in Germany, and an expert prediction survey was run in parallel to the public goods game with German farmers. The overall experiences from the workshops have been positive. The public goods game was met with great interest from stakeholders, albeit in all instances, there were concerns about the level of abstraction of the game. Another frequent concern was parallelism, i.e., the link between game results and real-world behaviour. We used 358 completed online responses from German farmers for an initial analysis. Farmers' behaviour in our study differed substantially from participants in the laboratory. Overall levels of cooperation among farmers were substantially higher than one would expect from previous laboratory studies. In addition, treatment effects were not in the expected direction. The only treatment that showed substantially larger contributions was to emphasize the social optimum of the game. Expert predictions were more in line with the literature from experimental laboratory studies than with the actual behaviour of farmers. Among the experts, those indicating good knowledge on the public goods game, predicted more accurately, whereas stated sector-specific knowledge (on agriculture, the common agricultural policy, or agri-environmental schemes) did not substantially improve predictions.

Solving grand environmental societal challenges calls for transdisciplinary and participatory methods in social-ecological research. These methods enable co-designing the research, co-producing the results, and co-creating the impacts together with concerned stakeholders. COVID-19 has had serious impacts on the choice of research methods, but reflections on recent experiences of "moving online" are still rare. In this perspective, we focus on the challenge of adjusting different participatory methods to online formats used in five transdisciplinary social-ecological research projects. The key added value of our research is the lessons learned from a comparison of the pros and cons of adjusting a broader set of methods to online formats. We conclude that combining the adjusted online approaches with well-established face-to-face formats into more inclusive hybrid approaches can enrich and diversify the pool of available methods for postpandemic research. Furthermore, a more diverse group of participants can be engaged in the research process. ; We acknowledge the following financial support for the authorship and publication of this perspective: C. Sattler, J.R., M.G.-L., I.G.-B., K.P., C. Schulze, L.G.J.B., B.M., and E.K. acknowledge support through Contracts2.0 and L.L. and C. Sattler through InnoForESt, both funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 program under grant agreements 818190 and 763899, respectively. C.C. and L.L. acknowledge support from PEATWISE, in which ZALF's research was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL) under grant 22408917. B.S. was supported by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) through a grant for the PlanSmart research group under grant 01UU1601B. M.F.R. obtained support through SIMTWIST funded by Water-JPI under grant ENWWW.2018.4.