Speaker
Description
A key challenge for territorial cohesion is to cope with the increasing marginalization and inequalities brought by urbanization. The “inland areas” discourse is today fostered by academic literature and policies to describe areas remote from the delivering of services such as health, education, and mobility while overcoming the connotation of “rural” in dichotomy with urban centres. These areas are undergoing a process of economic decline and depopulation, while not being recognized for their crucial role in terms of the multiple ecosystem services (ES) they provide to society. Such neglection is often due to current territorial policies, which prioritize investments based on economic benefits but fail to consider the ecological functions characterizing these areas. To overcome this gap, our work applies the lens of landscapes as social-ecological systems to analyse territorial dependencies between inland areas and urban poles, combining 9 socio-economic indicators for territorial characterization with patterns of supply and demand for 12 ES in Le Marche region, Italy. First, we identified 5 bundles of ES supply and demand, which were best characterized through land use and social indicators. Second, the ES budgeting highlighted how the outermost inland areas are the main providers of regulating and cultural ES; while the urban poles on the coast are the main consumers of provisioning services. Our results revealed the interdependencies along the coastal-mountain gradient, highlighting how the urban-rural dichotomy which characterize environmental analysis often disregard the socio-cultural heritage of the inland areas and ignore the polycentric condition of rural territories. These results allow to unveil potential environmental equity conflicts. We suggest that cohesion policies should embed a place-based approach integrating local environmental characteristics to the socio-economic perspective.
References
Barca F (2009) An agenda for a reformed cohesion policy: A place-based approach to meeting European Union challenges and expectations (Barca Report). European parlament, Bruxelles
Baró F, Gómez-Baggethun E, Haase D (2017) Ecosystem service bundles along the urban-rural gradient: Insights for landscape planning and management. Ecosystem Services 24:147–159. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2017.02.021
Bennett EM, Cramer W, Begossi A, et al (2015) Linking biodiversity, ecosystem services, and human well-being: three challenges for designing research for sustainability. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 14:76–85. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2015.03.007
Calafati A (2015) Città tra sviluppo e declino. Donzelli Editore, Roma. 9788868431419
Faludi A (ed) (2007) Territorial Cohesion and the European Model of Society, Illustrated edition. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Cambridge, Mass
Medeiros E (2016) Territorial Cohesion: An EU concept. European Journal of Spatial Development 14:30–30. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5141339
Rockström J, Gupta J, Qin D, et al (2023) Safe and just Earth system boundaries. Nature 619:102–111. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06083-8
| Keywords | cohesion policies; interdependencies; landscape ecology; ecosystem services; social-ecological systems |
|---|
