Paul Tabbush

Sustainability Impact Assessment of land use policies

List of Authors.- List of Authors.- Sustainability Impact Assessment: concepts and approaches.- Ex-ante Impact Assessments (IA) in the European Commission - an overview.- Impact Assessment in the European Commission in relation to Multifunctional Land Use.- An institutional analysis of land use modelling in the European Commission.- Ex ante impact assessment of land use changes in European regions - the SENSOR approach.- Transfer into decision support: The Sustainability Impact Assessment Tool (SIAT).- Scenario modelling of land use changes.- Scenarios: Driving forces and policies.- Cross sector land use modelling framework.- Tourism geography in Europe.- Landscape level simulation of land use change.- Spatial representation and data issues for European regions.- Regional socio-economic profiles for assessment of European land use related policies: the SENSOR experience.- A Spatial Regional Reference Framework for Sustainability Assessment in Europe.- Requirements for data management and maintenance to support regional land use research.- European level indicator framework.- An indicator framework for analysing sustainability impacts of land use change.- Indicators for assessing the environmental impacts of land use change across Europe.- Reflections on Social and Economic Indicators for Land Use Change.- Weighting and aggregation of indicators for sustainability impact assessment in the SENSOR context.- Regional and local evaluation.- Land use functions - a multifunctionality approach to assess the impact of land use changes on land use sustainability.- Limits and targets for a regional sustainability assessment: an interdisciplinary exploration of the threshold concept.- Sustainability Impact Assessments: limits, thresholds and the Sustainability Choice Space.- Key sustainability issues in European sensitive areas - a participatory approach.- Key sustainability issues and the spatial classification of sensitive regions in Europe.

Ex ante impact assessment of policies affecting land use, Part B: application of the analytical framework

The use of science-based tools for impact assessment has increasingly gained focus in addressing the complexity of interactions between environment, society, and economy. For integrated assessment of policies affecting land use, an analytical framework was developed. The aim of our work was to apply the analytical framework for specific scenario cases and in combination with quantitative and qualitative application methods. The analytical framework was tested for two cases involving the ex ante impact assessment of: (1) a European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) financial reform scenario employing a modeling approach and combined with a comprehensive indicator analysis and valuation; and (2) a regional bioenergy policy scenario, employing a fully participatory approach. The results showed that European land use in general is less sensitive to changes in the Common Agricultural Policy, but in the context of regions there can be significant impacts on the functions of land use. In general, the implementation of the analytical framework for impact assessment proved to be doable with both methods, i.e., with the quantitative modeling and with the qualitative participatory approach. A key advantage of using the system of linked quantitative models is that it makes possible the simultaneous consideration of all relevant sectors of the economy without abstaining from a great level of detail for sectors of particular interest. Other advantages lie in the incontestable character of the results. Based on neutral, existing data with a fixed set of settings and regions, an absolute comparability and reproducibility throughout Europe can be maintained. Analyzing the pros and cons of both approaches showed that they could be used complementarily rather than be seen as competing alternatives.

Ex Ante Impact Assessment of Policies Affecting Land Use, Part A: Analytical Framework

Contemporary policy making calls for scientific support to anticipate the possible consequences of optional policy decisions on sustainable development. This paper presents an analytical framework for ex ante assessment of economic, social, and environmental impacts of policy driven land use changes that can be used as an aid to policy making. The tasks were to (1) link policy scenarios with land use change simulations, (2) link land use change simulations with environmental, social, and economic impacts through indicators, and (3) valuate the impacts in the context of sustainable development. The outcome was a basis for dialogue at the science-policy interface in the process of developing new policies on the European level that impact on land and land use. The analytical approach provides a logical thread for ex ante impact assessment within the context of sustainable development, land use multifunctionality, and land use change and it provides a thorough discussion of achievements and open challenges related to the framework. It concludes with considerations on the potential for using evidence based ex ante assessments in the process of policy development. The paper is complemented by a B-paper providing exemplary results from two applications of the framework: a financial reform scenario of the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union, and a bioenergy policy scenario for the case of Poland (Helming et al. 2011).

Ex ante impact assessment of land use changes in European regions: the SENSOR approach

Land use includes those human activities that exhibit a spatial dimension and that change the bio-geophysical conditions of land. Land use policy making at European level aims at fostering sustainability pathways of natural resource use and rural development through the decoupling of economic growth from environmental degradation while supporting social cohesion in rural areas. Targeted policy making requires tools for the ex ante assessment of impacts of policy driven land use changes on sustainable development opportunities in European regions. These tools have to cover all relevant land use sectors and impact issues including their interrelations. They have to be spatially explicit, allow scenario analysis of possible future developments, be based on reproducible analyses, and be transparent and easy to use. The European Commission funded Integrated Project SENSOR is dedicated to develop such ex-ante Sustainability Impact Assessment Tools (SIAT) for land use in European regions. SIAT is designed as a meta modelling toolkit, in which global economic trend and policy scenarios are translated into land use changes at 1km2 grid resolution for the area of Europe. Based on qualitative and quantitative indicator analyses, impacts of simulated land use changes on social, environmental and economic sustainability issues are assessed at regional (NUTS2/3) scale. Valuation of these impacts is based on the concept of multifunctionality of land use. It is conducted through expert and stakeholder valuations leading to the determination of sustainability choice spaces for European regions. This paper presents the analytical approach in SENSOR and describes the impact assessment framework.

Coal ash and risk: Four social interpretations of a pollution landscape

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to examine how cultural and natural components of landscapes interact in the context of environmental change. The paper looks at an example of a ‘pollution landscape’ through the lens of four distinct perspectives on the relationship between landscapes and society derived from the literature. The aim is both to develop a holistic understanding of the interaction of landscape and society in the case study and to explore the insights and limitations of each perspective. The case study explored in this paper concerns coal ash pollution in the city of Tuzla in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Environmental changes due to coal ash pollution in Tuzla have compromised the capacity of the landscape to provide societal needs and generated new meanings associated with the landscape. The case study shows that landscape influences local perceptions of environmental risks and as a result, local inhabitants develop risk management strategies dwelling in a pollution landscape. The paper concludes that the relationship between landscapes and societies may be understood best as an interactive complex, examining the actions performed in and by landscapes.

Impact Assessment in the European Commission in relation to Multifunctional Land Use

This chapter reviews the potential application of Impact Assessment (IA) in the European Commission in relation to issues of land use. Drawing on qualitative research conducted with EC policy-makers, conclusions are drawn concerning the probable role and application of SENSOR’s Sustainability Impact Assessment Tool (SIAT) in the course of the EC Impact Assessment procedure.

Woods & People: Putting Forests on the Map

David Foot retired as a Forestry Commissioner in 1999, and so has a detailed knowledge of the Forestry Commission at a senior policy level. Here, he sets out to tell the story of British Forestry from its beginnings to the present, and then discusses future directions. The book is very well produced, brief and written in an easy, clear and readable style. It is illustrated with a centre spread of high-quality archive blackand-white and more recent colour photographs tracing changes in forestry and forest activities, and three colour maps showing the extent of forest cover in Britain in 1895, 1947 and 1998, and illustrating the great achievement in restoring woodland cover from about 5% of the land surface to around 11% today—still one of the least forested countries in Europe. The introduction states ‘‘. . . it is impossible to understand the countryside without examining the human factors that have shaped its development. I have tried to place the story in the context of social and economic circumstances of a quite remarkably transformed [twentieth] century’’ (p. 11). The author does not explore the public benefits of woodlands in any detail, giving only passing mention to Forest School, and no detailed analysis of the actual and potential educational (or health) benefits of woods, for example. This is not a detailed social history of forestry (it is more a political history), nor is it a treatise on the interaction between people and woods, as one might expect from the title. On the other hand, this is an authoritative account of the history of British woodlands, from the pen of a senior policy-maker. The strap-line ‘Putting Forests on the Map’ accurately conveys the type of overview that the book represents, and captures a sense of achievement in the woodland expansion of the last century. The book contains nine chapters and an introduction, with well-referenced notes on each chapter given at the end, and making this an excellent resource for students, researchers and professionals from a wide range of disciplines concerned with landuse. Chapter 1: ‘Beginnings’, begins the narrative with William the Conqueror and Domesday, and traces the decline of forests until the end of the nineteenth century. Half of the small area of woodland remaining at that time ‘‘comprised the fragmented remains of ancient woodland. The other half was reforestation – which is what this book is about’’ (p. 32). Chapter 2: ‘Voices for Forestry’, gives a fascinating insight into the early political debates that surrounded the establishment of the Forestry Commission in 1919, including an eloquent account of the debt owed to the vision and energy of its founding father, Lord Lovat. Chapter 3: ‘The Ideal Place to Grow Trees’, continues this story with an account of the influence of Lord Robinson, Landscape Research, Vol. 37, No. 1, 135–145, February 2012