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Over millennia human well-being has benefited from ecosystems, not only through tangible goods, but also through intangible assets known as cultural ecosystem services. Despite growing research over the last decade, cultural services assessment still remains arbitrary and is largely limited to marketable services such as tourism. Evident difficulties in standardizing definitions and measurements have challenged cultural services accounting in decision making processes. However, the imminent formation of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services offers an opportunity to counterbalance this misrepresentation by establishing a scientific basis for consistently assessing cultural services. In that regard, the current review intends to facilitate discussion investigating the current state of cultural services accounting by offering an appraisal of existing evidence regarding cultural services indicator quality. The current review builds on scientifically recognized frameworks to develop a holistic understanding of how cultural services indicators are conceived within ecosystem services research. Among the measures found, benefit indicators were most frequently used for assessing inspirational, educational and recreational services. A broad variety of methods for accounting cultural services was found, mainly due to the varied aims of the studies. Most of the cultural services indicators were deficient concerning their clarity of definitions, purposes and understanding of the processes to be measured and referring only marginally to tradeoffs and bundles with other services. Only 17% performed multitemporal assessments and 23% used spatially explicit information. It seems that cultural services indicators quality could be greatly enhanced by investing more effort towards involving relevant stakeholders in conceptualization and communication phases, using participatory mapping tools to enhance visibility.
Numerous studies underline the importance of immaterial benefits provided by ecosystems and especially by cultural landscapes, which are shaped by intimate human–nature interactions. However, due to methodological challenges, cultural ecosystem services are rarely fully considered in ecosystem services assessments. This study performs a spatially explicit participatory mapping of the complete range of cultural ecosystem services and several disservices perceived by people living in a cultural landscape in Eastern Germany. The results stem from a combination of mapping exercises and structured interviews with 93 persons that were analyzed with statistical and GIS-based techniques. The results show that respondents relate diverse cultural services and multiple local-level sites to their individual well-being. Most importantly, aesthetic values, social relations and educational values were reported. Underlining the holistic nature of cultural ecosystem services, the results reveal bundles of services as well as particular patterns in the perception of these bundles for respondent groups with different socio-demographic backgrounds. Cultural services are not scattered randomly across a landscape, but rather follow specific patterns in terms of the intensity, richness and diversity of their provision. Resulting hotspots and coldspots of ecosystem services provision are related to landscape features and land cover forms. We conclude that, despite remaining methodological challenges, cultural services mapping assessments should be pushed ahead as indispensable elements in the management and protection of cultural landscapes. Spatially explicit information on cultural ecosystem services that incorporates the differentiated perceptions of local populations provides a rich basis for the development of sustainable land management strategies. These could realign the agendas of biodiversity conservation and cultural heritage preservation, thereby fostering multifunctionality.
The potential of agriculture, forestry, and other land uses to sequester carbon offers a powerful tool for controlling the global climate regime, but practices capable of creating “collateral” benefits for landscape conservation have thus far been disregarded. This paper calls for greater integration of scattered trees into agricultural landscapes, hypothesizing that agroforestry practices effectively store carbon and deliver other important ecosystem services as well. Several agroforests from the Upper Lusatia area in Eastern Germany have been selected for analysis. They cover relatively large areas of land (8.2%), even within this intensively used agricultural landscape, and their extent increased from 1964-2008 by 19.4%. Practices of conserving or promoting the six agroforest classes are compared with a catalogue of essential properties for becoming effective “carbon offset projects”. Criteria from mandatory and voluntary carbon markets for carbon sequestration are then applied (additionality, baselines, permanence, and carbon leakage). The study concludes that steps towards realization of “carbon sequestration projects” should include collecting empirical evidence regarding the carbon sequestration potential of temperate agroforestry systems, developing localised demonstration projects, and upscaling these projects to participate in established carbon markets.
Nicht erst im Europäischen Jahr für Kulturerbe (2018) werden historische Landschaftsgärten und andere Kulturdenkmäler weniger als Kostenfaktor gesehen, sondern als Ressource, die als weicher Standortfaktor zu Wettbewerbsfähigkeit, Entstehung von Arbeitsplätzen und regionaler Entwicklung führt. Direkter ökonomischer Nutzen entsteht beispielsweise in den Bereichen Tourismus, Immobilienwirtschaft und Exportwirtschaft. Indirekter Nutzen kann sich durch Beiträge zum menschlichen Wohlbefinden, zum Heimatgefühl oder zur historischen Identität einer Region entfalten. Entsprechend wird beispielsweise von der Horizon 2020 Expert Group on Cultural Heritage der Europäischen Kommission gefordert, Kulturerbe als Querschnittsthema in verschiedenen Politikfeldern zu verankern. Die Debatte um die gesellschaftliche Aufwertung des Kulturerbes weist erhebliche Parallelen zur ökonomischen Aufwertung von Ökosystemen auf, die den Naturschutz im Zuge des globalen Umweltwandels stark beeinflusst hat. Mit der Erfindung des Konzepts der »Ökosystemleistungen« wurde ab der Jahrtausendwende eine ökonomische Argumentation zur Erhaltung der Natur eingeführt, die auf die globale Umwelt- und Entwicklungspolitik starken Einfluss ausgeübt hat und die in diesem Beitrag beleuchtet werden soll. Im Vergleich der Entwicklungen im Denkmalschutz und Naturschutz leitet der Beitrag Aussagen zu den Chancen und Risiken sowie Entwicklungspfade für eine gesellschaftliche Inwertsetzung von Kulturerbe ab.
Most industrial countries have experienced a transformation of land use: from decreasing to expanding forest areas, the so-called forest transition. Outside closed forests, European rural landscapes exhibit a diversity of tree-based agricultural systems, but the question of whether this forest transition has also affected ‘trees outside forests’ has rarely been studied. The aim of this study is to analyze the spatial-temporal dynamics of farm trees and woodlands in an agricultural landscape in Eastern Germany from 1964 to 2008, based on aerial photographs and digital orthophotos. Taking a landscape ecological perspective, we quantify farm tree dynamics, disentangle processes of gain and loss in the socialist and post-socialist periods of Eastern Germany, and assess differences in ecosystem services provided by farm trees. A substantial increase of overall tree cover by 24.8% was observed for the selected time period, but trajectories have been disparate across different farm tree classes. The increase in tree cover was stronger in steep valleys than on hills and plateaus, indicating a significant interdependence between topography and trajectories of change. Patch numbers of farm trees did not increase, which suggests that the expansion of tree cover is mostly due to a spatial expansion of previously existing tree patches. Overall net gains in tree cover were rather similar during the socialist and post-socialist eras. The general increase in tree cover was accompanied by increases in agriculture-related ecosystem service provision, but the increase in pollination and pest control services was much lower than that in water purification services. These findings present the first empirical evidence from an industrialized country that there is also an ongoing ‘forest transition’ outside closed forests. Potential, partially counteracting drivers of change during the socialist and post-socialist periods have mainly been related to farm policies and the environmental consciousness of land users and society as a whole.
In diesem Politikpapier definieren die Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler der Nachwuchsgruppe Ökosystemleistungen sieben Leitlinien für die Sicherung und Förderung von Ökosystemleistungen in Kulturlandschaften. Sie zeigen auf, wie diese in dem in Deutschland bestehenden Politikgefüge konkretisiert und implementiert werden können.