In Europe society faces many challenges, not the least in the face of climate change and the corresponding increasing intensity and occurrence of extreme weather events (e.g. extreme temperatures, drought or floods). In order to conserve biodiversity and the wellbeing of human society, we need to explore nature based solutions for these challenges and focus our efforts on maintaining, restoring and (re)creating robust and resilient nature, capable of coping with the increasing pressure of human population, water and land use and climate change. Process-oriented nature, allowing for functional ecological processes driving nature, is one of the major nature based solutions available. These ecological processes include climatic processes, hydrological processes, natural disturbances and interaction and dispersal and roaming of organisms, including large herbivores and carnivores. Human interventions in the landscape modify or disrupt these processes, often unseen as they extend across ownership boundaries or occur offsite and as consequences might only become visible after a long time. Most existing projects on wild nature are situated in remote and deserted areas. But this project aims at exploring process-oriented nature within man made landscapes, like many of our European agricultural or urbanised landscapes. The overall objective of the project is to build up knowledge and share experiences in transferring process-oriented nature conservation concepts and solutions to new areas in Europe, both new geographical areas and new applications in utilised landscapes, thus multiplying their scale and potential impact. The partnership consists of an array of organisations from different backgrounds and origin, but all with experiences touching on process-oriented nature. Ark has been working on rewilding approaches in the Netherlands for many decades. Fjällbete in Sweden have been working on holistic regenerative agriculture. Pro Natura have been involved in projects to look at wood pasture restoration and different solutions to the lack of grazing animals. The UK (via Knepp as an associate partner) have a rewilding project in a very intensively managed agricultural landscape. Both Belgian partners have been working on issues in relation to public perception with predators in densely populated areas, and the coorindator, Natuurinvest, is an organisation focused on 'learning'. Milvus Group has been working locally focusing on individual species’ initiatives to gain traction and acceptance for larger scale management. It is the combination of all partners' experience that will take the learning experience to the next level, both for partners and for the local stakeholders they will be working with throughout the project. The main tangible output of the project will be a handbook, a practical manual for professionals wanting to implement process-oriented nature conservation in man-made landscapes. This will be done by first identifying good practice in existing process-oriented nature projects, mostly in natural landscapes or within the boundaries of nature reserves. This will allow to define the driving forces behind successful projects, which will in turn be transferred in order to apply them to test case areas in all partner countries. The focus will be on selected landscape types with a high level of human influence, e.g. an agricultural landscape or an urbanised landscape. In these test case areas, we will work with local stakeholders to define how robust and wild nature can find its place and deliver its services. During this process, pitfalls and stumbling blocks for stakeholder support will most certainly pop up. These will be clearly defined and talked through in order to find solutions and compromises. In turn, that process will lead to the development of guidelines for stakeholder participation workshops. All these lessons learned will be compiled in a practical, intelligible and applicable manual. The focus will not only be ecological opportunities, but will also go to social and financial consequences for people living in and off these landscapes. An indirect impact of the project will be that stakeholder groups that otherwise very rarely meet or that have (alleged) conflicting interest, will have the opportunity to work together for a long period of time, focusing on the landscape they live in and off. Discussion, conflict and compromise will lead to more resilient landscapes, benefitting all stakeholders and society in the long term. This project aims at boosting and short-circuiting the learning process for professionals wishing to apply process-oriented nature conservation as a tool to create wild and robust nature, intertwined with human activity. Wild an robust nature side-to-side with human activities will prove to be an invaluable tool to mitigate the consequences of climate change and to halt the loss of biodiversity.
The overall objective of the project is to build up knowledge and share experiences in transferring process-oriented nature conservation concepts and solutions to new areas in Europe, both new geographical areas and new applications in utilised landscapes, thus multiplying their scale and potential impact. We wanted to ‘translate’ the current guidance (focused on very large areas, where human population is low, or which were recently depopulating due to demographic changes) to applications in the landscapes that surround most of us: landscapes in which people live, work and earn a living. The goal of process oriented nature conservation should not be to chase people from that landscape in order to restore biodiversity, but to reconnect people to the landscape, and find ways to thrive there ànd let natural processes and biodiversity thrive as well.
In Europe society faces many challenges, not the least in the face of climate change and the corresponding increasing intensity and occurrence of extreme weather events. In order to conserve biodiversity and the wellbeing of human society, we need to explore nature based solutions for these challenges and focus our efforts on maintaining, restoring and (re)creating robust and resilient nature, capable of coping with the increasing pressure of human population, water and land use and climate change. Process-oriented nature, allowing for functional ecological processes driving nature, is one of the major nature based solutions available. All partners felt the need to explore the route of process oriented nature conservation (‘rewilding’), but at the same time many of us felt the available guidance did not really apply to the landscapes we currently live in: man-made, utilised landscapes. So we wanted to explore the potential of these nature based solutions in those complex landscapes, which are often hostile to biodiversity.