How complex multifunctional landscapes will adapt to climate change: The role of science in identifying solutions to be implemented into planning and management.

Adapting landscape systems to climate change is an emerging topic in science. One of the most important challenges for future research will be to integrate research across different scales, including spatio-temporal scales within an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary framework. If we manage to follow this route, science will be able to move from analytical to actionable climate knowledge.

Science has played an important role in putting climate change on the world agenda. We have, now, to recognize and accept that the world’s climate is already changing and will continue to do so for decades. Considering the resulting impacts on land use and biota (Barker et al. 2007; Stern 2007), the option of adapting land use and landscapes to mitigate undesired implications by climate change is now appearing on the political and research agendas. The EU has now published a “white paper” on how it will focus its climate change adaptation policy (Commission of the European Communities 2009). The emphasis is on mainstreaming adaptation measures into EU policies: agriculture, forestry, health, biodiversity, ecosystems and water, coastal and marine areas and production systems and technical infrastructure. In terms of knowledge building, this calls for integrative approaches, crossing economic, social and environmental borderlines. Science is called to play a role in identifying solutions and ways to implement these in complex multifunctional landscape change. Is science ready for this? Our view (Opdam et al 2009) is that for science to get itself well-equipped for this major task, it has to evolve its emphasis from a reductionist, analytical approach aimed at identifying impacts, to a synthetic, design oriented approach aimed at generating solutions (Meinke et al. 2006). (For more details on the subject see: Opdam et al 2009 Landscape Ecology)

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