Maria Dolores Dominguez Garcia, Paul Swagemakers (p)

Nature represents value. Investments in nature should be made to conserve biodiversity, in the context of international obligations, and because we can effort, but also because these investments pay itself back, and can be a driver of economic growth. With nature we refer to landscape and green space in use as municipal parks, forests, or productive land. In the past decades, areas that from an economic point were considered less valuable were often considered for nature conservation. In contemporary society, leisure and recreational functions make such areas valuable and (can become) relevant for regional economic development. This added value, earnings in the real economy, results in economic prosperity: in economic value.
In this paper, case study research is on forestry associations in Galicia. We pay specific attention to how comuneiros (commoners), parishioners, collectively own and manage (urban) green areas, and plant or rejuvenate forests of native species to enhance ecological services (water retention, fire prevention, biodiversity) while also including productive functions such as wood and forest fruit production and animal husbandry, the latter implying to turn monte (often abandoned mountainous areas that consist of bushes and scrub) into pastures. These “agroforestry activities” not only fulfill ecological and agricultural functions but also provide social services. Forest organisations can provide an anchor for the planning, design and governance of societal needs. As a self-regulatory organisational form they do not generate direct governance costs for the public administration. With the aim to examine the position and strategies of self-governing forest organisations, we explore their organisational-institutional environment and how this and their activities can facilitate (and/or obstruct) the successful management of urban green space in a sustainable manner. We conclude that this particular type of forest management provides products (food and non food) and services which are not only of private interest as potential new business opportunities but also of high public value. In future research costs and benefits need to be identified, and it should be assessed whether the income that is generated indeed can be related to nature, which through this new type of business opportunities further sustains.

Livia Madureira (p), Pedro Gabriel Silva

Portuguese mountainous areas experienced a long term decline in both their natural and social capital. Within the later 30 years the mountainous agroforestry and pastoral agro-ecosystems which shaped the current landscape of these areas have been progressively abandoned in association with major sociodemographic and economical changes, which have led to depopulation, population ageing, farmland abandonment and grazing decline. These changes have facilitated the expansion of recurrent wild fires that impoverished their natural capital stocks and flows of regulating ecosystem services. Climate change tends to aggravate these soil and landscape degradation trends. Within the recent years the tourism and the demand for cultural services in these areas have exhibited an opposite trend, what has led to the expansion of the tourism supply, including accommodation and the offer of recreation services. Agri-environmental have had a limited success, varying between practically unsuccessful in same protected areas to a successful policy measure on another, mainly depending on the role of common land (collectively ownership) to pasture. The traditional natural protected areas policies had contradictory impacts and show somehow exhausted.
This paper bases on empirical evidence collected to the Natural Park (NP) of Serra da Estrela (NPSE) to illustrate the decline on both the social and natural capital, and on the respective flow of services (social and natural capital based), along with the increase on the demand of cultural services. Ecosystem mapping and economic valuation methods have been employed, along with the regional data available to estimate some indicators for green accountability.
The main goal of the paper is to use the evidence abovementioned to anchor a discussion on innovative collective-based solutions for the value capture of the services of natural capital at the local level. These build largely on the acknowledgement of the local population, the tourists and visitors, the general public, along with the economic and political actors, of the scarcity and the cost (and value) of the provisioning, regulating and cultural services supplied by the mountainous areas.

Gülçin Tunç (p)

Acknowledging that environmental equality is an indispensable part of sustainable development goals, my proposed paper aims at investigating the compatibility of developmental trends with environmental quality and justice by focusing on the case of Bursa metropolitan area in Turkey. The observed gap between statutory law as well as official discourse and institutional practice is the starting point for this research. In the last decade there is an ever growing volume of statutory law regarding sustainable development and environmental protection in Turkey in accordance with country’s engagement with EU’s environmental policy framework. However, as stated in ‘Turkey Progress Report 2014’ (pp.71) by the European Commission “Turkey has made some progress in aligning legislation in the fields of environment and climate change, whereas enforcement remains weak.”
Two main sources of the discrepancy between sustainable development requirements and actual pratice could be identified as follows: the unequal enforcement of environmental laws and the lack of established perspectives of sustainability and resilience in country’s planning culture. Within this regard, in the recent past, Bursa has witnessed local people’s insurgency against environmental impact assessment decisions, which approved the activities of marble quarries or thermal power plants that have direct contaminating impacts on water resources and air quality of urban and rural residential areas. On the other hand, state-led construction boom of the last decade alongside the persistent lack of an established resilience perspective in country’s planning culture have been other important factors negatively affecting the environmental quality and justice in Bursa.
Against this backdrop, my proposed contribution intends to grasp the comprehensive picture of environmental quality and justice in seventeen districts of Bursa metropolitan area. For this end, I would gather and develop a quantitative data set from various secondary sources including official statistics, site analysis reports of master plans and other official and academic reports, where I can obtain data on demography, building and population density, land use, basic infrastructure, urban amenities (access to green spaces in particular), waste collection and disposal services, air, water and soil quality, environmental protection and public health policies, disaster-prone areas, residential areas’ proximity to toxic sites, spatial distribution of industrial investments, the existence of disputable investments and planning amendments promoting further urban growth, transport related problems etc. In this way, by utilizing factor analysis, my purpose is to compute an enviromental quality index for comparing different districts and to develop a basic tool for evaluating environmental justice.