Providing Adaptive knowledge for Ratcheting up the EU Biodiversity strategy for Sustainable landscapes and protected areas

PAREUS will develop an innovative landscape approach to integrate policy and land use practice to ensure equitable and sustainable land use in close collaboration with stakeholders from multiple sectors to ensure the co-creation of knowledge. The project will explore different ways to create a coherent network of protected areas (PAs) for biodiversity within the wider countryside. Through international and transdisciplinary research and national case studies, PAREUS will address integrated, informed, inclusive, and adaptive policy measures development regarding PAs and other effective area-based conservation measures (OECM), supporting transformative governance by reconciling conservation and sustainable land use, as well as measures contributing to effectively protecting species in the wild. Furthermore, PAREUS will assess the implementation of relevant EU BDS2030 targets regarding land management issues and its challenges within real landscapes. Identification of factors that prevent those targets from being implemented at the national scale, and how they may be crystallized into national strategies and relevant policies at the regional level within the country, allows authorities to administer the legal and economic incentives for PAs, and to realize a coherent network of PAs. By tackling the central challenge of biodiversity and land degradation from the perspective of transformative governance allows PAREUS to complement PA conservation with OECM approaches. PAREUS will develop a spatial planning tool that creates participatory visualizations for an engaging and informative future orientation of sustainable landscapes that will help EU member states (and associated member states) to reach their own national biodiversity strategy, as well as the future Global Biodiversity Framework post-2020. During the first year, so-called cookbooks were produced to ensure that all activities are aligned among case study regions to obtain comparable outcomes, allow each partner to execute these activities, and allow for reproducibility of the research approach also beyond the project. Also, a policy inventory was performed across case study regions to improve understanding on the specific context within which each region is set. To ensure a balanced representation of each region’s local landscape characteristics, a clustering analysis was performed. This analysis clustered each region’s municipalities according to 11 environmental variables, including the relative protected area per municipality. Within each region, this led to the identification of three clusters each from which representatives will be invited to the project’s workshops.

PAREUS will apply an innovative landscape approach to integrate policy and practice for multiple land uses to ensure equitable and sustainable use of land within a spatially explicit framework and in close collaboration with multiple stakeholders from multiple sectors to ensure the co-creation of knowledge. The project will explore different ways to create a coherent network of protected areas (PAs) for biodiversity where the wider countryside is also included. Through transnational and transdisciplinary research and national case studies, PAREUS will address integrated, informed, inclusive, and adaptive policy measures development regarding PAs and other effective area-based conservation measures (OECM) supporting transformative governance by reconciling conservation and sustainable use of the land, as well as measures contributing to effectively protecting species in the wild. Furthermore, PAREUS will assess the implementation of EU BDS2030 relevant targets regarding land management issues and its challenges within real landscapes. Identification of factors that prevent those targets from being implemented at the national scale, and how they may be crystallized into national strategies and relevant policies at the regional level within the country, allows authorities to administer the legal and economic incentives for PAs, and to realize a coherent network of PAs. By tackling the central challenge of biodiversity and land degradation from the perspective of transformative governance allows PAREUS to complement PA conservation with OECM approaches. PAREUS will develop a spatial planning tool that creates participatory visualizations for an engaging and informative future orientation of sustainable landscapes that will help EU member states and associate members to reach their own national biodiversity strategy, as well as the future Global Biodiversity Framework post-2020.