Activating local resources for cultivating regional cooperation for sustainable land-use

Informations

Funding country

Norway

Acronym

BIOSPHERE

URL

-

Start date

1/1/2021

End date

12/31/2025

Budget

1,536,269 EUR

Fundings

Abstract

BIOSPHERE aims to strengthen social-ecological resilience in peri-urban and rural Norway. To ?build back better? we need to apply more holistic and inclusive approaches to solving the complex and interconnected challenges of our time. We must build a knowledge base for the complexities of managing a multidimensional reality, enhancing social-ecological resilience and avoiding conflict, based on the perception of land as a basic limited resource. BIOSPHERE will meet the increasing calls for Nature based Solutions and establish ?nature? as the fundamental basis for building sustainable economies and societies. We will do so by generating integrated whole-systems knowledge of social-ecological systems, using UNESCO?s Man and the Biosphere-programme as our context and empirical basis. Our regional partners, Alver municipality and Nordhordland UNESCO Biosphere, will enable transdisciplinary and participatory approaches to knowledge and solution generation for a more sustainable development, in line with the UN?s Agenda 2030. This regional collaboration and strong local involvement provide a unique testing ground for deeper analysis of trends in land-use and for developing societal resilience in the transition to a low-emission society. By extending our understanding of complex adaptive systems through local cooperation, we will facilitate scaling up of sustainability solutions within sectors and scaling out across geographies and societies. We will use the newly established (2019) Nordhordland UNESCO Biosphere Area as our empirical testing ground. We have newly appointed a PhD-candidate that will work with a 50-year old data material from the region. By re-sampling this unique legacy dataset, the Lindås-project (1971-76) with regards to vegetation and soil, in combination with stakeholder processes and comparative studies abroad, we will gain important new knowledge on the speed and direction of land-use change over the past 50 years and generate scalable solutions for sustainable land-use in Nordhordland and beyond. The newly appointed postdoc will analyse processes in the social-ecological system to unravel the role of stakeholders and drivers in this process. We have already arranged three workshops with stakeholders to gain a common understanding of the framing of the project and to co-produce research case studies that will be used as the empirical basis. To achieve durable impacts, we will work to align the motivations of public, private, and civil society actors, together with Alver municipality, Nordhordland UNESCO Biosphere Area, our regional stakeholders, UNESCO Paris, and international partners.