SUSTAINABLE LANDSCAPES & REGIONS

Sustainable development & Regions at the landscape or regional level that is what Sustainable Landscapes (SLR) & Regions research is all about. Aiming for sustainable landscapes requires an inclusive societal process that leads to ecological, economic and socio-cultural sustainability at the landscape scale. Agricultural intensification, industrial progress and urbanization have strong detrimental impacts on the landscapes as coupled social and ecological systems we live in. Maintaining resilient and harmonious landscapes is key to human identity and belonging, to biodiversity and to ecosystem services that support human well-being. Balancing these complex and diverging forces requires strong landscape governance.

The Sustainable Landscapes & Regions research theme at UG is devoted to developing knowledge for better landscape governance by combining cutting-edge disciplinary and integrative research from widely differing scientific fields. Development towards sustainable landscapes requires evidence-based knowledge regarding landscape governance that acknowledges and understands on the one hand the hard economic values and forces which are essential for progress and on the other the soft vulnerable values and forces so important to higher human well-being needs, including biodiversity. Crucially it also calls for new integrative transdisciplinary methods as a productive focal point of creating and sharing knowledge.

The theme is convinced that knowledge production and learning towards sustainable landscape governance goes nowhere without practical knowledge and wisdom. This makes close connections to a wide array of stakeholders an essential ingredient for our success. It calls for new combinations and partnerships of science, entrepreneurs, citizens, NGOs and governments; it calls for building landscape knowledge and understanding in unexplored ways.