While human well-being depends upon the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and ecosystem services, global changes and unsustainable human activities increasingly threaten the world’s capacity to deliver those services over the long term.
In Europe and beyond, a solution to such challenges can be found by merging landscape planning with ecosystem services concepts. Landscape planning has strengths in recognition of public benefits and implementation mechanisms, while the ecosystem services approach makes the connection between the status of natural assets and human well-being more explicit. It can also provide an economic perspective, focused on individual preferences and benefits, which helps validate the acceptability of environmental planning goals. Thus linking landscape planning and ecosystem services provides a two-way benefit, creating a usable science to meet the needs of local and regional decision making.
The new handbook entitled “Landscape Planning with Ecosystem Services – Theories and Methods for Application in Europe” is structured around the Driving forces-Pressures-States-Impacts-Responses framework, providing an introduction to relevant concepts, methodologies and techniques. It presents a new, ecosystem services-informed, approach to landscape planning that constitutes both a framework and toolbox for students and practitioners to address the environmental and landscape challenges of 21st century Europe.
The book consists of contributions from 46 authors with many of them ESP members, 31 chapters and more than 500 pages. The book was edited by Christina von Haaren, Andrew Lovett and Christian Albert and is available in bookstores, libraries, and online: https://www.springer.com/us/book/9789402416794