Nexus thinking – how ecosystem services concepts and practice can contribute balancing integrative resource management through facilitating cross-scale and cross-sectoral planning

This special issue (SI) is primarily composed of 12 papers generated from a selection of contributions from two main events. The first event was the biannual conference organized by the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO) Working Party (Division 8): Forest Landscape Ecology, held in Tartu (Estonia) in 2015, under the theme ‘Sustaining Ecosystem Services in Forested Landscapes’. The second event was a symposium organized during the Ecosummit in Montpellier (France) in 2016 under the theme Ecological Sustainability: Engineering Change. The symposium was a joint effort from the EU-funded OpenNESS project, IALE and IUFRO communities, under the theme ‘Scenarios and models of key indirect and direct drivers in relation to nature’s benefits to people’. These two events have a common ground addressing the use of ecosystem services (ES) in planning and policymaking at different scales. Although the focus of the events, and of this SI, is multi-sectoral, emphasis is given on integrative multifunctional landscape management approaches, with examples mainly from forested landscapes. Besides, this common effort integrates important inputs from the forest cluster of the EU-OpenNESS project (Operationalization of natural capital and ecosystem services) that also participated in the symposia and exchange of ideas and approaches.

ES are broadly acknowledged as a means to support and facilitate planning and decision-making processes. Overall, the use of ES in planning and decision making can contribute to improve the quality of land use and management proposals by addressing synergies, trade-offs and conflicts between economic, environmental and social goals, and unveiling hidden effects, such as those associated with regulating services at local and global scales (Saarikoski et al. 2017; Turkelboom et al. 2017). Furthermore, using ES as a reference for assessing planning alternatives facilitates the development of decisions across administrative boundaries while supporting the performance of plans and projects within a wider social–ecological context with potential to reveal effects at different scales (local, regional and global). Still the intertwined relation between policies and decisions in land management is complex because of the many challenges posed by multiple social, economic, political and environmental contexts and their interactions (Dick et al. 2017). Our objective is also to discuss how ES can be embedded in a nexus between nature, humanity and scales to build a bridge for their implementation in environmentally relevant policy sectors, spatial planning and land use (see also Rozas-Vásquez et al. 2017).

Within this vein, in this SI, experts from different backgrounds provided their vision based on real-world experiences. The central question we proposed as challenge for this SI was:

How to make land-use choices actionable in the real world to address multifunctional landscape planning needs?

Within this framework we believe this SI provides grounds on the nexus-thinking approach, defined here as the ability to hold key developmental variables together, when searching for solutions at different levels within a holistic landscape approach (Schmalzbauer and Visbeck 2016). We set up the scene for this SI with a position paper (Fürst et al. 2017), where we present the concept of ES embedded in this nexus approach. Thus, ES could help to facilitate the identification of synergies and potential conflicts between different policy sectors while helping to harmonize particularly implementation measures so that no competing signals are sent out to spatial planning and land management. The nexus approach to ES could also contribute to widen the decision space of land-use sectors and their actors through supporting trade-off analysis and identifying substitutional strategies in managing land and shaping landscape pattern.

A first set of papers in this issue is motivated on more generalized land-use planning and land management aspects at landscape scale (e.g., Cebrián-Piqueras et al. 2017; Pinto-Correia et al. 2017; Sil et al. 2017; Syrbe et al. 2017). Meanwhile a second set of papers is centred on cases where the incorporation of ES concepts supports the implementation of nexus thinking in planning and decision making (e.g., Bezák et al. 2017; Grunewald et al. 2017; Inkoom et al. 2017; Martínez Pastur et al. 2017; Matthews and Iverson 2017; Peri et al. 2017). The first group of papers comprises the elaboration of methodological frameworks in the search to develop options towards more sustainable landscapes. For example, Dick et al. (2017) tested the cascade model from the perspective of a multi-stakeholder focus group discussion.

The ES nexus concept could help to detect mismatches between the policy sectors that could jeopardize the overall aim of a sustainable development through stirring competing spatial prioritization and land management strategies. Examples on this approach in this issue are the papers from Sil et al. (2017), Martínez Pastur et al. (2017), Matthews and Iverson (2017) and Syrbe et al. (2017).

Concluding, as presented in Fürst et al. (2017), the next step to make the nexus-thinking approach operational will be deciding upon success or failure of the ES concept in terms of its consistent use in pre-assessing and co-developing policy, spatial, and land use planning instruments and implementation measures. We believe that these set of papers will create interest and inform integrative resource management practices through enabling cross-scale and cross-sectoral planning to evaluate ES with a holistic approach.

Acknowledgments

This SI emerged from two conferences as mentioned in the text, in which the co-guest editors were involved as organizers. We thank the many people who organized, presented or attended these conferences, as they provided many stimulating discussions and presentations. We thank the many reviewers who volunteered their time to review the articles in this SI. We also thank the enthusiasm and continuing support from the IUFRO, IALE and ELI communities that make these outcomes possible. We also thank the support of the EU-funded OpenNESS Project that partially funded the research of some of the papers published in this volume (research funded by the European Union EU FP7 project OpenNESS (Grant agreement no. 308428)). We especially want to thank the authors for their time and patience to participate in this volume and the continuous support from IJBESM to make this SI possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported partially by the European Union EU FP7 project OpenNESS [308428].