Leen Gorissen

Spatially combining wood production and recreation with biodiversity conservation

Pine plantations established on former heathland are common throughout Western Europe and North America. Such areas can continue to support high biodiversity values of the former heathlands in the more open areas, while simultaneously delivering ecosystem services such as wood production and recreation in the forested areas. Spatially optimizing wood harvest and recreation without threatening the biodiversity values, however, is challenging. Demand for woody biomass is increasing but other pressures on biodiversity including climate change, habitat fragmentation and air pollution are intensifying too. Strategies to spatially optimize different ecosystem services with biodiversity conservation are still underexplored in the research literature. Here we explore optimization scenarios for advancing ecosystem stewardship in a pine plantation in Belgium. Point observations of seven key indicator species were used to estimate habitat suitability using generalized linear models. Based on the habitat suitability and species’ characteristics, the spatially-explicit conservation value of different forested and open patches was determined with the help of a spatially-explicit conservation planning tool. Recreational pressure was quantified by interviewing forest managers and with automated trail counters. The impact of wood production and recreation on the conservation of the indicator species was evaluated. We found trade-offs between biodiversity conservation and both wood production and recreation, but were able to present a final scenario that combines biodiversity conservation with a restricted impact on both services. This case study illustrates that innovative forest management planning can achieve better integration of the delivery of different forest ecosystem services such as wood production and recreation with biodiversity conservation.

Tailoring business model innovation towards grand challenges

Purpose – This paper aims to focus on the interface between a society in transition and the role, practices and culture of businesses herein, a topic that has scarcely been researched so far. Grand challenges such as energy scarcity and resource depletion will have substantial impacts on the functioning of contemporary business models. Companies, however, still largely focus on efficiency strategies leading to sub-optimal solutions rather than radically changing their business model. Design/methodology/approach – It describes a project that has been run for a social enterprise in which a transition management approach was used to discover their new future role and explore new business concepts that function within the boundaries of significantly different material management principles. Findings – The authors discuss how this case study can contribute to the limited developed empirical research on how businesses can be more proactive in changing the way societal systems operate, and whether the approach c...

Nature-Based Solutions Accelerating Urban Sustainability Transitions in Cities: Lessons from Dresden, Genk and Stockholm Cities

Nature based solutions are amongst other practices that transition initiatives work with when intervening in their place and change its fabric. Focusing on the actors establishing, driving and scaling these solutions in and across cities, we come to evince that nature-based solutions have transformative social impact since they mediate new social relations and new social configurations contributing to social innovation in cities, and change nature perception and human-nature relations in urban contexts. We built from evidence in three city-regions that over the past years they saw the proliferation of community-based and policy-based initiatives with the aim to improve sustainability, livability and the aspiration to foster inclusivity and social justice in their cities: the city of Dresden in Germany, the city of Genk in Belgium and the city-region of Stockholm in Sweden. We will elaborate on the different ways nature based solutions as practices of transition initiatives in cities get scaled and contribute to accelerating sustainability transitions in these city-regions. In line with this, we will draw cross-case lessons for urban planning on the tensions transition initiatives that experiment with and institutionalize nature-based solutions in their cities face when actively pursue acceleration strategies and pathways to scale.