Final Report Summary - VOLANTE (Visions Of LANd use Transitions in Europe)
Executive Summary:
The landscapes of Europe have altered rapidly over the last few decades, with profound changes in the ways we use the land to support a growing, and increasingly affluent and urban population. The past 50 years have seen significant and unprecedented human impacts on our landscapes and we have now entered a critical decision space: a window of several decades within which it is still possible to avoid crossing planetary boundaries. In a Europe facing many challenges and changing aspirations, it is imperative to explore alternative visions of a more sustainable future land use, and evaluate the pathways that can lead us to these visions. Within the context of land use, this implies managing natural capital to ensure the continued provision of ecosystem services into the future. This document sets out a roadmap to a future Europe that manages its land resources better to achieve several societal and environmental goals.
The VOLANTE roadmap comprises: a) three visions of future land use in Europe derived from consultations with a wide range of European stakeholders, with the linked components of food, feed and fibre production, rural development and urbanisation; b) a set of pathways required to achieve these visions in a suite of scenarios, and c) the implications of these visions and pathways for society and decision makers, including the associated trade-offs. A general consensus is emerging around future European land use, which emphasises the role of multi-functionality, resource efficiency and the provision of services in rural areas – all of which are reflected in the VOLANTE visions:
BEST LAND IN EUROPE
Optimal use of land resources REGIONAL CONNECTED
Living closer to the natural environment LOCAL MULTIFUNCTIONAL
Self-sufficiency of local communities
Optimal use of land is crucial to ensuring maximum production of food and other natural products. Land across the EU is matched to the most appropriate use. Society’s needs are met regionally in a coherent relationship between people and their resources. In a non-globalised economy, there is a move away from regional specialisation. Land functions are localised in small areas based on innovative approaches to living, working and recreation. There is high diversity in goods and services, land use and society.
The VOLANTE roadmap emphasises that there are alternative, not necessarily compatible, visions of future sustainable land use in Europe. Under current socio-economic and policy conditions, however, none of these visions can be achieved without the need for trade-offs. Local Multi-functional, in particular, seems the most challenging vision to achieve without a thorough transformation in society and decision-making processes, underpinned by individual behavioural change. Best Land in Europe would supply the greatest quantity of ecosystem services on a continental scale, but remote rural areas would struggle to support local communities unless land use and economic activities were restructured, for example by moving away from a dependence on agriculture to new rural businesses that require new infrastructure. Regional Connected would require strong regional governance and regulation and a broad acceptance of this by society. Despite major contrasts between the three VOLANTE visions, there are important similarities which highlight the need for bold and coordinated change in European land use.
Moving towards the visions requires targeted policy intervention that takes account of the diverse regional contexts across Europe and which balances trade-offs in a transparent and well-informed way. To be effective and relevant, such policies also require cross-sectoral strategies for land use and management that depart from the traditional focus on sectoral policy. The incentive for such strategies is that European land resources must be used more efficiently, providing a wider range of benefits, including a better environment, enhanced socio-economic wellbeing, and ultimately a more equitable European society.
Project Context and Objectives:
VOLANTE – Visions of land use transitions in Europe was a large collaborative project under the European Commission’s R&D 7th Framework Programme, running from November 2010 to April 2015.
Context for the project was the observation that the world is changing rapidly and land use transitions occur at an ever increasing pace, responding to changing conditions of global markets and societies. European Policy is confronted with the need to develop visions of managing these land use transitions in a responsible way. Answering this need, VOLANTE aimed to develop a new European land management paradigm, providing an integrated conceptual and operational platform which allows policy makers to develop pro-active and context-sensitive solutions to the challenges for the future, rather than to react on largely autonomous external land systems developments.
Objective of VOLANTE was to provide European policy and land management with critical pathways defining the bandwidth of possible land management policies for future European land use. Policy options have therefore been identified in time and space and their consequences in terms of states of the land system (provisioning of ecosystem goods and services) have been evaluated, leading to a Roadmap for Future Land Resources Management in Europe.
The VOLANTE team tackled three major research questions:
1. What are the socio-economic and ecological processes that shape land use transitions in Europe?
2. How can bottom-up and top-down modelling tools be improved and used in a comprehensive way to assess critical thresholds for resource management with reference to land use change and ecosystem services?
3. Which innovative visions can be formulated for future sustainable resource management and land use policy development under a range of environmental and management conditions across Europe?
VOLANTE has brought together researchers with experience and expertise on land use change at various spatial and temporal scales enabling a focus on vision development. The Module Processes has identified land use changes and the processes causing these, testing unproven hypotheses by extensively using the experience gained in earlier projects and studying crucial missing links. Problem orientation was the basis for the Module Assessment, which narrowed down the infinite spectrum of policy decisions possible. Module Visions established intensive interaction with decision makers at regional and European level, to enhance an evidence based and problem oriented science-policy interface. A special, professional and consistent effort was made to gather the views of a broad set of stakeholders and to include them in all steps of the process.
General progress
The VOLANTE project has proceeded largely as planned. Although some minor changes have occurred in the timing of delivering intermediate products, which also caused other activities to be slightly postponed, this did not substantially hamper the work in other work packages. Especially the production of the consolidated visions took more time than planned to fully do justice to the efforts taken by our strongly committed stakeholder community. In the end of the project all results came nicely together, so that we had the opportunity in the last 6 months of the project to focus on developing carefully our final documentation supporting the launching of the VOLANTE Roadmap on the 21st of April 2015. Several follow-up actions have been set in motion since. The project has moreover produced a large number of well-cited scientific publications.
Module Processes
The Module Processes finalized work on Europe-wide land-use changes, including the identification of common combinations of land change patterns and drivers (named archetypes of land change), as well as the verification and dissemination of results from local case studies through workshops in the participating countries. Results from the Module Processes were disseminated to a broader audience through conferences and scientific papers. The primary focus within the last period was on integrating insights from the Module Processes into other parts of the VOLANTE project. Results were used intensively in the VOLANTE roadmapping process. Here results served as inputs to workshops with stakeholders (visions, trade-off, roadmap) and as verification and help to find possible explanations of results from Europe-wide modelling activities in the project. Members of the Module Processes were also involved in deliverables from work packages in the Module Visions, in particular related to the trade-off analysis and the scenario work, as well as in drafting the Roadmap Document, and in presenting results at workshops.
Module Assessment
In this period Module Assessment worked with Module Visions to develop the pathway analysis. Conceptually this part is the largest innovation of VOLANTE in terms of linking normative visions with exploratory scenarios and assessment of policy options to find pathways towards sustainable land use in Europe. For that purpose the exploratory scenarios of land use and ecosystem service implications were characterized into indicators that could be linked to elements of the visions created by stakeholders. This iterative process required post-processing of model results created in earlier reporting periods as well as research aimed at the enhanced analysis and visualisation of the assessment results to allow feedback to stakeholders. Specific work was conducted towards finalizing the bottom-up agent-based modelling framework and assessing the ecosystem service trade-offs of specific land change trajectories.
Module Visions
Module visions finalized the three consolidated stakeholder visions, following final consultations in two workshops. The visions were published in a glossy brochure and visualised in a short movie. These visions form the endpoints for the pathway analysis, which explores possible modelled trajectories to reach them. Methods for the pathway analysis were developed and discussed internally and with stakeholders. The final pathway analysis integrated major results derived from the Modules Assessment, Visions and Processes and was a core input to the final VOLANTE roadmap. Trade-offs between pathways were subsequently assessed using a spatial multi-criteria analysis, revealing hotspots of land use and ecosystem services change under different pathways. As such, insights were gained on the impacts of reaching the visions on European land use, including displacement effects outside Europe. Finally, the VOLANTE roadmap was developed, providing a concise synthesis of main findings for land use policy makers. The roadmap was discussed in a final stakeholder workshop and successfully presented in Brussels on 21 April 2015. A special issue of Regional Environmental Change featuring 15 research papers encompassing the work in Module visions is currently in preparation.
Project Results:
The VOLANTE project designed a roadmap for future land resource management in Europe , and successfully presented this to 75 policymakers in Brussels 21 April 2015. Representatives from the European Commission, NGO’s, professional and business organisations, and international, national and regional institutions confirmed the timeliness of the endeavour and praised the convincing scientific underpinning of the Roadmap.
The roadmap is based on a carefully organised chain of research and consultation activities. The VOLANTE Roadmap is supported by a large body of background information and documentation. This Scientific Basis is also available as an interactive internet based file at the VOLANTE website , including access to all supporting information. References (and hyper-links) in the digital document version refer to the next layer supporting the Roadmap itself: Syntheses of the VOLANTE research activities are given in a large number of Fact sheets. These Fact sheets contain further reference to basic results of the various research activities in VOLANTE Deliverables and scientific papers. Although already many papers acknowledging VOLANTE work haven been published, the scientific publication process is of course a little lagging behind, but it is expected that in the coming two years still some 25 – 30 additional papers explicitly referring to VOLANTE inputs will appear in peer reviewed journals.
Referring to this documentation, to the project Deliverables and to the progress reports (especially the 3rd 54 months’ report), we feel the following main S&T results are worth mentioning as especially innovative:
o Displacement effects of land use change in Europe to affect land use in other parts of the world have been quantified (www.volante-project.eu/images/Factsheets/P1_Displacement_effects.pdf)
o Major advances have been made regarding the complex issue of policy driven land use change (www.volante-project.eu/images/Factsheets/P2_Policy_driven_land_use_change.pdf)
o Extensive descriptions and interpretations could be given of land use change in the past, both referring to a time scale of 200 years (D4.3)
o New insights into the development of Human appropriated net primary production (HANPP) and maps of the changes in the past 100 years have been produced (D3.1)
o Very detailed analyses and innovative maps have been produced of land use changes in the past 25 years, using various indicators of land management and land use intensity, which allows interpreting the simple land cover changes (D3.4; www.volante-project.eu/images/Factsheets/P3_Agricultural_Abandonment_recultivation_and_Intensification.pdf)
o Fuzzy cognitive mapping has successfully been applied to identify drivers of change in consultation with local stakeholder groups (www.volante-project.eu/images/Factsheets/P5_Fact_sheet_Drivers_of_change.pdf)
o Many existing land use models have been adapted and used to describe scenarios, policy alternatives and pathways (see Factsheets A1 – A24 at www.volante-project.eu/documents/102-fact-sheet.html)
o A spatially explicit assessment of current ecosystem services supply for Europe was carried out (D8.2)
o A very innovative agent based model at European level has been developed to simulate land use actors’ responses to changing societal requirements (http://www.volante-project.eu/images/Factsheets/A23b_Achieving_visions_of_future.pdf)
o A sophisticated stakeholder consultation process (including a web-based canvas tool to compose visions) has led to the definition of scenarios, visions and pathways, which were very much supported by the stakeholders (www.volante-project.eu/docs/visions.pdf)
o An integrated framework has been developed, in order to link explorative projections of future land use, derived from quantitative simulation models, to normative stakeholder visions of desired land use futures (http://www.volante-project.eu/images/Factsheets/V1_Pathway_Analysis_Method.pdf)
o A deliberately developed approach to assess trade-offs of the identified pathways has been developed (www.volante-project.eu/images/Factsheets/V5_Methods_for_Tradeoff_analysis.pdf).
These achievements are currently being exploited both in scientific and in societal communities, with many presentations and discussion contributions being given by all project partners in conferences and seminars. Also, a large part of the methodology has in the meantime found its use also in new projects in which VOLANTE partners participate, both EU-projects (such as OPENNESS, OPERAS, HERCULES etc.) and other international and national projects.
Potential Impact:
Impact
The potential impact of this project lies particularly in its follow-up by the stakeholders involved. The key messages have been presented to a wide audience, and the reactions were very positive. Judging from the informal feedback received, it is expected that the following organisations are willing to integrate the methodology and approach of VOLANTE into their own policy development, and with most of them follow-up meetings with VOLANTE partners have already taken place:
o OECD
o Committee of the Regions
o EC DG Env
o EEA
o EC DG Agri
o EC DG Regio
o ESPON
o UNESCO
o various national ministries and spatial planning agencies.
As an example, in the Netherlands the VOLANTE scenarios and methodology have been adopted to develop European visions for nature (Nature Outlook), to be presented and discussed during the Netherlands presidency of the EU in the first half of 2016.
In the scientific community the impact is large: many VOLANTE partners contribute actively to the debate about land use change in networks such as IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change), GLP (Global Land Project), IALE (International Association of Landscape Ecology), Future Earth, JPI CHGC (Joint Programming Initiative on Cultural Heritage and Global Change), LTSER (Long Term Socio-Ecological Research), and many others. The exact societal impact of VOLANTE through these networks is difficult to assess, but the VOLANTE message is certainly well noticed.
Also the socio-economic impact of VOLANTE is difficult to judge, since it was not the objective of VOLANTE to directly influence socio-economic activities. However, given the large number of stakeholders and institutions engaged in the various phases of the VOLANTE project, and the appreciation of the interesting results obtained, it is very probable that land use planning processes will benefit from VOLANTE’s procedures and results.
Dissemination activities
The VOLANTE results have been (and are still increasingly being) disseminated optimally through well-cited scientific publications, papers and poster contributions to many conferences, and contributions to summer schools and PhD courses across Europe (see templates A1 and A2 in section 4.3). To facilitate the proper accessibility of all information and results produced, the VOLANTE website was restructured before the end of the project duration. Since the website was increasingly being used as an information source for external users, specifically this use was now simplified and enhanced.
In the end of the project a large number of interested persons were informed by direct e-mail of the launch of the VOLANTE Roadmap, and also press releases were widely distributed. We got confirmation from various sides that this was an effective way of dissemination.
Exploitation of results
VOLANTE has never had the objective to commercially exploit its results, and this is effectively not the case. Still, as indicated under Impact, there is large interest from the scientific and policy community to continue work with the VOLANTE methods and tools. In various projects the VOLANTE achievements are in the meantime being followed up.
List of Websites:
www.volante-project.eu
The landscapes of Europe have altered rapidly over the last few decades, with profound changes in the ways we use the land to support a growing, and increasingly affluent and urban population. The past 50 years have seen significant and unprecedented human impacts on our landscapes and we have now entered a critical decision space: a window of several decades within which it is still possible to avoid crossing planetary boundaries. In a Europe facing many challenges and changing aspirations, it is imperative to explore alternative visions of a more sustainable future land use, and evaluate the pathways that can lead us to these visions. Within the context of land use, this implies managing natural capital to ensure the continued provision of ecosystem services into the future. This document sets out a roadmap to a future Europe that manages its land resources better to achieve several societal and environmental goals.
The VOLANTE roadmap comprises: a) three visions of future land use in Europe derived from consultations with a wide range of European stakeholders, with the linked components of food, feed and fibre production, rural development and urbanisation; b) a set of pathways required to achieve these visions in a suite of scenarios, and c) the implications of these visions and pathways for society and decision makers, including the associated trade-offs. A general consensus is emerging around future European land use, which emphasises the role of multi-functionality, resource efficiency and the provision of services in rural areas – all of which are reflected in the VOLANTE visions:
BEST LAND IN EUROPE
Optimal use of land resources REGIONAL CONNECTED
Living closer to the natural environment LOCAL MULTIFUNCTIONAL
Self-sufficiency of local communities
Optimal use of land is crucial to ensuring maximum production of food and other natural products. Land across the EU is matched to the most appropriate use. Society’s needs are met regionally in a coherent relationship between people and their resources. In a non-globalised economy, there is a move away from regional specialisation. Land functions are localised in small areas based on innovative approaches to living, working and recreation. There is high diversity in goods and services, land use and society.
The VOLANTE roadmap emphasises that there are alternative, not necessarily compatible, visions of future sustainable land use in Europe. Under current socio-economic and policy conditions, however, none of these visions can be achieved without the need for trade-offs. Local Multi-functional, in particular, seems the most challenging vision to achieve without a thorough transformation in society and decision-making processes, underpinned by individual behavioural change. Best Land in Europe would supply the greatest quantity of ecosystem services on a continental scale, but remote rural areas would struggle to support local communities unless land use and economic activities were restructured, for example by moving away from a dependence on agriculture to new rural businesses that require new infrastructure. Regional Connected would require strong regional governance and regulation and a broad acceptance of this by society. Despite major contrasts between the three VOLANTE visions, there are important similarities which highlight the need for bold and coordinated change in European land use.
Moving towards the visions requires targeted policy intervention that takes account of the diverse regional contexts across Europe and which balances trade-offs in a transparent and well-informed way. To be effective and relevant, such policies also require cross-sectoral strategies for land use and management that depart from the traditional focus on sectoral policy. The incentive for such strategies is that European land resources must be used more efficiently, providing a wider range of benefits, including a better environment, enhanced socio-economic wellbeing, and ultimately a more equitable European society.
Project Context and Objectives:
VOLANTE – Visions of land use transitions in Europe was a large collaborative project under the European Commission’s R&D 7th Framework Programme, running from November 2010 to April 2015.
Context for the project was the observation that the world is changing rapidly and land use transitions occur at an ever increasing pace, responding to changing conditions of global markets and societies. European Policy is confronted with the need to develop visions of managing these land use transitions in a responsible way. Answering this need, VOLANTE aimed to develop a new European land management paradigm, providing an integrated conceptual and operational platform which allows policy makers to develop pro-active and context-sensitive solutions to the challenges for the future, rather than to react on largely autonomous external land systems developments.
Objective of VOLANTE was to provide European policy and land management with critical pathways defining the bandwidth of possible land management policies for future European land use. Policy options have therefore been identified in time and space and their consequences in terms of states of the land system (provisioning of ecosystem goods and services) have been evaluated, leading to a Roadmap for Future Land Resources Management in Europe.
The VOLANTE team tackled three major research questions:
1. What are the socio-economic and ecological processes that shape land use transitions in Europe?
2. How can bottom-up and top-down modelling tools be improved and used in a comprehensive way to assess critical thresholds for resource management with reference to land use change and ecosystem services?
3. Which innovative visions can be formulated for future sustainable resource management and land use policy development under a range of environmental and management conditions across Europe?
VOLANTE has brought together researchers with experience and expertise on land use change at various spatial and temporal scales enabling a focus on vision development. The Module Processes has identified land use changes and the processes causing these, testing unproven hypotheses by extensively using the experience gained in earlier projects and studying crucial missing links. Problem orientation was the basis for the Module Assessment, which narrowed down the infinite spectrum of policy decisions possible. Module Visions established intensive interaction with decision makers at regional and European level, to enhance an evidence based and problem oriented science-policy interface. A special, professional and consistent effort was made to gather the views of a broad set of stakeholders and to include them in all steps of the process.
General progress
The VOLANTE project has proceeded largely as planned. Although some minor changes have occurred in the timing of delivering intermediate products, which also caused other activities to be slightly postponed, this did not substantially hamper the work in other work packages. Especially the production of the consolidated visions took more time than planned to fully do justice to the efforts taken by our strongly committed stakeholder community. In the end of the project all results came nicely together, so that we had the opportunity in the last 6 months of the project to focus on developing carefully our final documentation supporting the launching of the VOLANTE Roadmap on the 21st of April 2015. Several follow-up actions have been set in motion since. The project has moreover produced a large number of well-cited scientific publications.
Module Processes
The Module Processes finalized work on Europe-wide land-use changes, including the identification of common combinations of land change patterns and drivers (named archetypes of land change), as well as the verification and dissemination of results from local case studies through workshops in the participating countries. Results from the Module Processes were disseminated to a broader audience through conferences and scientific papers. The primary focus within the last period was on integrating insights from the Module Processes into other parts of the VOLANTE project. Results were used intensively in the VOLANTE roadmapping process. Here results served as inputs to workshops with stakeholders (visions, trade-off, roadmap) and as verification and help to find possible explanations of results from Europe-wide modelling activities in the project. Members of the Module Processes were also involved in deliverables from work packages in the Module Visions, in particular related to the trade-off analysis and the scenario work, as well as in drafting the Roadmap Document, and in presenting results at workshops.
Module Assessment
In this period Module Assessment worked with Module Visions to develop the pathway analysis. Conceptually this part is the largest innovation of VOLANTE in terms of linking normative visions with exploratory scenarios and assessment of policy options to find pathways towards sustainable land use in Europe. For that purpose the exploratory scenarios of land use and ecosystem service implications were characterized into indicators that could be linked to elements of the visions created by stakeholders. This iterative process required post-processing of model results created in earlier reporting periods as well as research aimed at the enhanced analysis and visualisation of the assessment results to allow feedback to stakeholders. Specific work was conducted towards finalizing the bottom-up agent-based modelling framework and assessing the ecosystem service trade-offs of specific land change trajectories.
Module Visions
Module visions finalized the three consolidated stakeholder visions, following final consultations in two workshops. The visions were published in a glossy brochure and visualised in a short movie. These visions form the endpoints for the pathway analysis, which explores possible modelled trajectories to reach them. Methods for the pathway analysis were developed and discussed internally and with stakeholders. The final pathway analysis integrated major results derived from the Modules Assessment, Visions and Processes and was a core input to the final VOLANTE roadmap. Trade-offs between pathways were subsequently assessed using a spatial multi-criteria analysis, revealing hotspots of land use and ecosystem services change under different pathways. As such, insights were gained on the impacts of reaching the visions on European land use, including displacement effects outside Europe. Finally, the VOLANTE roadmap was developed, providing a concise synthesis of main findings for land use policy makers. The roadmap was discussed in a final stakeholder workshop and successfully presented in Brussels on 21 April 2015. A special issue of Regional Environmental Change featuring 15 research papers encompassing the work in Module visions is currently in preparation.
Project Results:
The VOLANTE project designed a roadmap for future land resource management in Europe , and successfully presented this to 75 policymakers in Brussels 21 April 2015. Representatives from the European Commission, NGO’s, professional and business organisations, and international, national and regional institutions confirmed the timeliness of the endeavour and praised the convincing scientific underpinning of the Roadmap.
The roadmap is based on a carefully organised chain of research and consultation activities. The VOLANTE Roadmap is supported by a large body of background information and documentation. This Scientific Basis is also available as an interactive internet based file at the VOLANTE website , including access to all supporting information. References (and hyper-links) in the digital document version refer to the next layer supporting the Roadmap itself: Syntheses of the VOLANTE research activities are given in a large number of Fact sheets. These Fact sheets contain further reference to basic results of the various research activities in VOLANTE Deliverables and scientific papers. Although already many papers acknowledging VOLANTE work haven been published, the scientific publication process is of course a little lagging behind, but it is expected that in the coming two years still some 25 – 30 additional papers explicitly referring to VOLANTE inputs will appear in peer reviewed journals.
Referring to this documentation, to the project Deliverables and to the progress reports (especially the 3rd 54 months’ report), we feel the following main S&T results are worth mentioning as especially innovative:
o Displacement effects of land use change in Europe to affect land use in other parts of the world have been quantified (www.volante-project.eu/images/Factsheets/P1_Displacement_effects.pdf)
o Major advances have been made regarding the complex issue of policy driven land use change (www.volante-project.eu/images/Factsheets/P2_Policy_driven_land_use_change.pdf)
o Extensive descriptions and interpretations could be given of land use change in the past, both referring to a time scale of 200 years (D4.3)
o New insights into the development of Human appropriated net primary production (HANPP) and maps of the changes in the past 100 years have been produced (D3.1)
o Very detailed analyses and innovative maps have been produced of land use changes in the past 25 years, using various indicators of land management and land use intensity, which allows interpreting the simple land cover changes (D3.4; www.volante-project.eu/images/Factsheets/P3_Agricultural_Abandonment_recultivation_and_Intensification.pdf)
o Fuzzy cognitive mapping has successfully been applied to identify drivers of change in consultation with local stakeholder groups (www.volante-project.eu/images/Factsheets/P5_Fact_sheet_Drivers_of_change.pdf)
o Many existing land use models have been adapted and used to describe scenarios, policy alternatives and pathways (see Factsheets A1 – A24 at www.volante-project.eu/documents/102-fact-sheet.html)
o A spatially explicit assessment of current ecosystem services supply for Europe was carried out (D8.2)
o A very innovative agent based model at European level has been developed to simulate land use actors’ responses to changing societal requirements (http://www.volante-project.eu/images/Factsheets/A23b_Achieving_visions_of_future.pdf)
o A sophisticated stakeholder consultation process (including a web-based canvas tool to compose visions) has led to the definition of scenarios, visions and pathways, which were very much supported by the stakeholders (www.volante-project.eu/docs/visions.pdf)
o An integrated framework has been developed, in order to link explorative projections of future land use, derived from quantitative simulation models, to normative stakeholder visions of desired land use futures (http://www.volante-project.eu/images/Factsheets/V1_Pathway_Analysis_Method.pdf)
o A deliberately developed approach to assess trade-offs of the identified pathways has been developed (www.volante-project.eu/images/Factsheets/V5_Methods_for_Tradeoff_analysis.pdf).
These achievements are currently being exploited both in scientific and in societal communities, with many presentations and discussion contributions being given by all project partners in conferences and seminars. Also, a large part of the methodology has in the meantime found its use also in new projects in which VOLANTE partners participate, both EU-projects (such as OPENNESS, OPERAS, HERCULES etc.) and other international and national projects.
Potential Impact:
Impact
The potential impact of this project lies particularly in its follow-up by the stakeholders involved. The key messages have been presented to a wide audience, and the reactions were very positive. Judging from the informal feedback received, it is expected that the following organisations are willing to integrate the methodology and approach of VOLANTE into their own policy development, and with most of them follow-up meetings with VOLANTE partners have already taken place:
o OECD
o Committee of the Regions
o EC DG Env
o EEA
o EC DG Agri
o EC DG Regio
o ESPON
o UNESCO
o various national ministries and spatial planning agencies.
As an example, in the Netherlands the VOLANTE scenarios and methodology have been adopted to develop European visions for nature (Nature Outlook), to be presented and discussed during the Netherlands presidency of the EU in the first half of 2016.
In the scientific community the impact is large: many VOLANTE partners contribute actively to the debate about land use change in networks such as IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change), GLP (Global Land Project), IALE (International Association of Landscape Ecology), Future Earth, JPI CHGC (Joint Programming Initiative on Cultural Heritage and Global Change), LTSER (Long Term Socio-Ecological Research), and many others. The exact societal impact of VOLANTE through these networks is difficult to assess, but the VOLANTE message is certainly well noticed.
Also the socio-economic impact of VOLANTE is difficult to judge, since it was not the objective of VOLANTE to directly influence socio-economic activities. However, given the large number of stakeholders and institutions engaged in the various phases of the VOLANTE project, and the appreciation of the interesting results obtained, it is very probable that land use planning processes will benefit from VOLANTE’s procedures and results.
Dissemination activities
The VOLANTE results have been (and are still increasingly being) disseminated optimally through well-cited scientific publications, papers and poster contributions to many conferences, and contributions to summer schools and PhD courses across Europe (see templates A1 and A2 in section 4.3). To facilitate the proper accessibility of all information and results produced, the VOLANTE website was restructured before the end of the project duration. Since the website was increasingly being used as an information source for external users, specifically this use was now simplified and enhanced.
In the end of the project a large number of interested persons were informed by direct e-mail of the launch of the VOLANTE Roadmap, and also press releases were widely distributed. We got confirmation from various sides that this was an effective way of dissemination.
Exploitation of results
VOLANTE has never had the objective to commercially exploit its results, and this is effectively not the case. Still, as indicated under Impact, there is large interest from the scientific and policy community to continue work with the VOLANTE methods and tools. In various projects the VOLANTE achievements are in the meantime being followed up.
List of Websites:
www.volante-project.eu