Abstract
Recent extreme weather events have clearly shown that intensive agricultural use, drainage-focused water management, and groundwater extraction endangers present and future agricultural production and environmental quality in Dutch sandy-soil landscapes. These are especially vulnerable as fresh-water supply is limited and soils drain fast. Hence, there is an urgent need for a radical paradigm shift to secure future socio-economic functioning of these landscapes. Our overall aim is nothing less than the proposition of a climate-robust and sustainable (i.e. circular) use of the sandy-soil landscapes of the Netherlands to future-proof their agricultural development and environmental quality. In the proposed nature-based landscapes, functions will be aligned with non-engineered moisture conditions. These regenerated landscapes will be resilient to climate change, soils will become carbon sinks, and biodiversity decline will be reversed. We assembled a transdisciplinary consortium to co-design and co-create the knowledge to: 1) Determine spatially explicit ‘natural’ moisture conditions in heterogeneous sandy-soil landscapes under present and future climate conditions; 2) Identify innovative land uses that align with the future soil and water conditions; 3) Identify economically viable and societally acceptable approaches for sustainable land use, as well as the required legal framework, and 4) Design adaptation pathways towards regenerated landscapes. The ‘NAT’ project is complementary to Wallinga’s recently awarded NWO-NWA CASTOR project and the associated TKI-KLIMAP project (WENR), all building on successes of the NKWK Lumbricus programme. The joint Community of Practice (CoP) of the projects provides the platform for co-design and co-creation of knowledge, translate output to outcome and foster socio-environmental transformation.
Netherlands