Tailoring the ecosystem services approach to landscape level management (TESL)

The main objective of this project has been to study how ecological, economic and social aspect of natural resources in Lofoten can be constituted as ecosystem services and in particular, what importance cultural ecosystem services can have for well-being and quality of life. We have collected data in a number of different ways. At the island of Røst we conducted a scenario process with local representatives from the fishing industry, public management, school-, health- and transportation sectors, the tourism industry, and culture and private enterprises where we developed four versions of ?The good life at Røst?. The local concept of quality of life embed elements that are usually not captured by research on preferences and well-being. The Røst version contains aspects of life that most people will perceive as challenges, difficulties, and even significant risk. The demanding environment with changing weather, geographic isolation from the mainland, and a fishing industry that brings with it hard work, unpleasantness and danger, are important components in local identity and well-being. Research on ecosystem services and quality of life often rests on an economic model operating with different forms of capital (social, natural, built), and which measures quality of life as the degree of satisfied preferences. In contrast, we show that a high degree of life-satisfaction can also include significant elements of challenge, hardships and mastery, factors that are commonly perceived to detract from well-being. We have also conducted interviews with domestic and foreign tourists across Lofoten about perceptions of change, attractions, drivers of change, travel patterns, contacts with local residents and attitudes toward environmental management and policy issues. The results show that cultural ecosystem services are prime attractions for those who visit the islands, and that ?nature?, i.e. the spectacular scenery outcompetes all other aspects of attractions. At the same time, the cultural environment and cultural heritage is more or less interpreted as part of the natural environment. In general, the tourists express a strong negative attitude towards a scenario with oil- and gas exploration along the Lofoten coast. The resistance is particularly strong among foreign visitors who often rank Lofoten high on their list of international nature tourism destinations they have visited. Landscape and geologic conditions also proved to be far more important in valuing cultural ecosystem services than most prior studies have shown. Furthermore, we have completed a large community survey covering all the municipalities in Lofoten except for Røst, on the topics, perceptions of and use of ecosystem services, place attachment, perceptions of drivers of social and environmental change, and the importance of environmental attributes for well-being and related quality of life issues. The results from this part of the study show that Lofoten-Vesterålen residents are not particularly concerned about global drivers of change, geopolitics in the North, or some of the major environmental issues that surface in the media. The exception is the debate over oil- and gas exploration where a majority report a negative attitude towards local petroleum exploration as an option. Moreover, the local residents have minimal focus on climate change and environmental management issues beyond oil and gas. However, they are all the more concerned about what they perceive as door-step issues like conflicts and challenges in the fishing industry, the reorganisation of the municipal structure into larger administrative units, the future quality of public services, the need for better roads, and the debate over a possible new and larger regional airport. We have also examined the importance of a series of environmental attributes, as well as social and institutional conditions for quality of life in the archipelago. We have ?deconstructed? these into a long list of specific attributes like fish- and bird species, landscape elements, wind, weather and light conditions, in order to assess how they separately and in concert contribute to local identity and well-being. We treat these as relational values, i.e. values that constituted through the interaction between humans and the natural environment, as a contrast to the more traditional way of conceptualizing values as either intrinsic or instrumental. Results show that cultural ecosystem services can play a significant role in the formation and experience of quality of life. The project has been reported through three published scientific articles, two more submitted for review, a technical report, two published master thesis (resource management and geography), a third (psychology) to be defended during the spring term 2018, as well as in conference presentations.

This project will apply a combination of ecological, economic and social data to classify ecological services (ES) and values in an interdisciplinary framework. The project aims at: a) contributing new information about ecosystem services in an integrated framework with particular focus on cultural services, b) combine existing and new data towards refining frameworks for hybrid monetary and non-monetary valuation of ES, and c) link ES valuation to scenario development. We intend to use the Lofoten - Ve sterålen region as a case study area. Here we have access to a number of data sets on different types of tourism, cultural landscapes and heritage, agriculture, fisheries, coastal- and terrestrial ecology (seabirds, the marine ecosystem, geese, reindeer h erding) There is considerable debate over preffered futures, and with options for different types of economic development, the ecological, social, economic and cultural ramifications can vary greatly, and subsequently future ecosystem services. The pro ject will: 1) Map ecosystem services by inventorying, re-analyzing and synthesizing existing data on ecological and human dimensions of the environment and classify key components and functions of the ecosystem and their contribution to the generation of different categories of ecosystem services, 2) Study how stakeholders value changes in ecosystem service flows compared to a 'business as usual scenario', and evaluate how they prioritize trade-offs and benefits associated with different development paths , and 3) Examine how of the outputs of an ecosystem services classification of natural resources use can be spatially integrated into land use management and used to inform policy at multiple administrative scales.