Shaping landscapes for nature-based adaptation to climate change

Sandra Lavorel - Laboratoire d'écologie alpine: LECA, médaille d'or CNRS 2023
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Conservation, sustainable management and restoration of biodiverse ecosystems have the potential to support people’s adaptation to climate change. A wide range of such nature-based solutions for adaptation are being experimented and implemented around the world. Yet, one of the biggest challenges is their scaling-up for attaining simultaneous goals of climate mitigation and adaptation, sustainable production and biodiversity conservation, referred to here as multifunctionality. This scaling starts in landscapes, which are the natural and decision spaces relevant to multiple stakeholders. In her presentation, Sandra Lavorel will introduce the concept of climate-smart landscapes and summarise current knowledge on principles for their design and implementation. Their design needs to consider how to combine different land uses and how to configure them spatially. Their recent research offers understanding of how not just the amount of area dedicated to conservation or restoration, as recommended by international policy, determines desired multifunctionality, but how spatial configuration matters. What are the benefits of restoring in larger patches of conserved nature versus of bringing back more natural elements within the matrix of natural landscapes ? What are main trade-offs across goals depending on spatial configuration ? She will then consider which social and institutional processes are needed to shift from current to climate-smart landscapes, focusing on interactions between knowledge, institutions and people’s values. Finally, she will specifically consider how actor networks influence the collaborative governance and pathways towards climate-smart landscapes, highlighting the need to simultaneously analyse ecological (nature-nature), social (people-people) and social-ecological (people-nature) interactions.