Speakers
Description
To respond to increasing climate risks and transform regions towards systemic climate resilience, nature-based solutions (NBS) are widely considered a promising approach. Yet its implementation is still in its infancy. One of the obstacles is that NBS need more land than structural risk mitigation measures. This land is often in private landownership. It is challenging to activate such land for the implementation of NBS, hitherto NBS are largely only implemented on public land. This leads to a major implementation gap for NBS on private land.
To implement NBS on private land, private interest in land and public interest in NBS need to be aligned. This is the domain of land policy. Land policy relies on public policy instruments and strategies, such as land readjustment, pre-emption rights or expropriation. However, evidence from previous studies (e.g. Raska et al. 2022) show the limitations of land policy for NBS. The interventions cannot be properly legitimized and are politically difficult. Cooperative approaches to activate the land are needed. This leads to new challenges: How to find the right landowners to cooperate with, how to approach them, and how to replicate and upscale such cooperation?
The European Horizon project - LAND4CLIMATE pioneers with such questions. First empirical results on local case studies on implementing NBS on private land in Austria, Czechia, Germany, Italy, Romania, and Slovakia provide valuable insights: While formal land policy instruments indeed are barely able to get access to private land, project results show more success when focussing on benevolent landowners, in this contribution labelled as the philanthropic landowner.
This contribution tries to understand interest and agency of such philanthropic landowners based on a qualitative reflection of the interaction between implementers of NBS and individual landowners. The contribution concludes with next research questions and hypotheses on how to implement NBS on private land. Thereby it contributes to the discussion on effective, efficient, just and legitimate land policy solutions for contemporary challenges.
References
Raška, P., et al. (2022). Identifying barriers for nature-based solutions in flood risk management: An interdisciplinary overview using expert community approach. Journal of Environmental Management, 310, 114725. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2022.114725
| Keywords | climate risks; property; nature-based solutions; flood risk; LAND4CLIMATE |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
