Speaker
Description
Soils are pivotal to multiple environmental processes and services, including carbon sequestration, water buffering, biodiversity, and food production. Yet they remain marginalized in planning practices, which, if they do, predominantly focus on erosion control and avoiding soil sealing. In the age of "wicked problems", the need for innovative and systemic approaches, i.e. a nexus approach, is ever greater.
This research applies such a lens. It explores how spatial planning can address living soil issues in agroecosystems, a critical yet underprioritized issue in Flanders, with an emphasis on the capacity of planning to transcend policy silos, land-use boundaries and spatial scales. The study investigates possible planning instruments that can leverage public land ownership and existing land management strategies to contribute to the transition towards sustainable agroecosystems and the development of landscape agroecology. More specifically, the focus is on public land management and land acquisition policies for nature and water related policy objectives. The ongoing retirement wave in the agricultural sector presents a unique opportunity to grant access and long-term security on public land to farmers, enabling them to adopt regenerative practices and ensuring both ecological and economic viability. These possible transitions are also related to broader challenges and policy objectives such as water management, biodiversity and climate resilience, connecting farm-level interventions to regional planning objectives. This way, the study seeks to develop pathways in which these goals also entail a future for farmers, rather than the continuation of separate policy silos that only increase the struggle for land?
The research is conducted and put to practice on the level of a pilot area in the ‘Flemish Westhoek’, but findings will be tested against the broader scope of the Flemish agricultural sector throughout different regions.
| Keywords | Living soils; Landscape agroecology; Rural Planning; Cross-domain synergies; Public (farm)land |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
