Towards sustainable cultural landscapes
Cultural landscapes connect nature and society, having been shaped and maintained by people and their activities over millennia. Physical features of the human environment interplay with social structures and human ideas. Humans perceive and value the existence of landscapes and, at the same time, interact with them and even create them. Interest in the values of and threats to landscapes has strongly increased since the European Landscape Convention has been adopted in 2000. An EU-funded project, HERCULES (Sustainable futures for Europe’s heritage in cultural landscapes: Tools for understanding, managing, and protecting landscape functions and values), addressed current obstacles to sustainable development. These include knowledge gaps, a lack of understanding of the added values of cultural landscapes, and the absence of support systems to assist cultural landscape management and policies on all levels. HERCULES developed an innovative, participatory methodological procedure to understand the long-term development and transformation of cultural landscapes. Mapping, modelling, and policy advice at EU level were complemented by work with local communities in eight study landscapes distributed across Europe. Researchers drew on recent insights from geography, landscape archaeology, (historical) ecology, anthropology and information science. The project worked closely with civil-society driven landscape initiatives and identified ways how these can be supported in their stewardship of cultural landscapes in Europe. Three EU-level workshops were organised that contributed to the flow of information, gathering practitioners and participants from European institutions, government agencies, NGOs, businesses and academia. The team developed a common cultural landscapes framework as well as maps to assess how cultural landscapes have been transformed during recent decades in terms of land-use change at a pan-European scale. Results of the project include a broad range of outputs targeted at science, practice and policy around cultural landscapes, such as landscape stewardship, landscape labelling and integrated landscape management for the implementation of the Sustainable development goals in Europe. Policy recommendations were also dedicated to climate change and resilience and to promote a landscape approach to environmental governance. All outputs have been assembled in a platform “HERCULES Knowledge Hub for Good Landscape Practices”.
Keywords
Sustainable, cultural landscapes, landscape change, HERCULES, heritage
