Unravelling the relation between Values of Nature and Telecoupling
To contribute to sustainable land management, there is a need for understanding the societal drivers behind land-owners’ and land managers’ decisions that influence the provision of Nature’s Contributions to People (NCP). Drawing and expanding on the ecosystem service framework, the NCP framework explicitly acknowledges that these contributions are not only derived from nature but also require inputs from humans, a process known as “coproduction”.
In the previous phase of Biodiversity Exploratories, the research project entitled ‘Effects of land management on the Supply and Distribution of ecosystem services – ESuDis-’ operationalized the concept of NCP co-production in the three Biodiversity Exploratories study sites and linked the NCP co-production with the level of land-use intensity.
In VaNaTe, we will expand the focus of ESuDis by understanding the unknown interactions between two of the most important societal drivers that underpin land management: landowners’ and managers’ values of nature and NCP and telecoupling of NCP co-production.
- To understand the relationship between land-owners’ decisions regarding land management and their value-systems with regards to nature and NCP.
- To identify and characterise the telecoupling archetypes that underpin land-owners’ decisions with regard to NCP co-production.
- To gain in-depth knowledge of the feedback loops between telecoupling archetypes, values-systems, NCP co-production and land-management intensification.
VaNaTe is organized in three working packages (WPs).
- WP1 seeks to elicit and spatially map values of nature and NCP expressed by landowners and managers through content analysis, photo-voice, surveys with a psychometric scale, multivariate statistics and participatory GIS.
- WP2 aims to identify and characterize archetypes of telecoupling of NCP co-production through content analysis, surveys, GIS, multivariate regressions and hierarchical cluster analysis.
- WP3 will disentangle the relations between telecoupling archetypes, values, NCP co-production and land-use intensity through a clustered heatmap analysis.
Using the IPBES framework of values of nature to study how people value nature, we found that overall relational values resonated more broadly than intrinsic and instrumental values. Among foresters and farmers, we found that although they tend to express relational values more frequently than instrumental or intrinsic values, these patterns vary by land management type. Those land managers whose value system is mainly based on instrumental values prioritise short-term gains in material benefits, such as fodder and timber, in their management decisions, leading to land-use intensification driven by greater mobilisation of fertilisers, pesticides, and machinery. By contrast, land managers whose value system is mainly based on relational values foster extensive and organic management (in the case of farmers) and report that conserving nature, habitat maintenance and climate regulation are their main motivations.
By applying the metacoupling framework to examine telecoupled flows derived from land managers’ decisions, we found that wood production at the Biodiversity Exploratories’ study sites relies heavily on telecoupled flows of anthropogenic capital. For example, machinery used for harvesting, such as harvesters, forwarders, and chainsaws, is mainly imported from other European countries or from other parts of the world. Based on research on telecoupling across different Nature Contributions to People, we concluded that telecoupling can jeopardise efforts to move towards sustainable land-use management.
Scientific assistants
