EU: Visions of Land Use Transitions in Europe (VOLANTE)

VOLANTE aims 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 is to provide European policy and land management with critical pathways defining the band width of possible land management policies for future European land use. Policy options will therefore be identified in time and space and their consequences in terms of states of the land system (provisioning of ecosystem goods and services) will be evaluated, leading to a ROADMAP FOR FUTURE LAND RESOURCES MANAGEMENT IN EUROPE. To realise this, VOLANTE is designed in three Modules to gain better understanding of the PROCESSES underpinning land use change in Europe, to exploit ASSESSMENT tools that are capable of identifying critical pathways for land management in a variety of environmental and management regimes across Europe, and to provide insight into the role of land management decisions on future sustainability: VISIONS. VOLANTE brings together researchers with experience and expertise on land use change at various spatial and temporal scales enabling a focus on vision development. Module Processes identifies land use change and the processes causing these, testing unproven hypotheses by extensively using the experience gained in earlier projects and studying crucial missing links. Problem orientation is the basis for the Module Assessment, which will narrow down the infinite spectrum of policy decisions possible. Module Visions establishes interaction with decision makers at regional and European level, to enhance evidence based and problem oriented science-policy interface. A special, professional and consistent effort will be made to gather the views of a broad set of stakeholders and to include them in all steps of the process.