Search

The concept of differentiated land use was formulated already 50 years ago to preserve biodiversity and to maintain or restore the necessary landscape structure. Although it has been anchored in the Federal Nature Conservation Act, there is still no monitoring of its implementation, although the German Advisory Council on the Environment has been calling for this for 25 years. The paper argues that the technical prerequisites for monitoring the differentiated land use are ready today and discusses the conceptual steps necessary. It identifies several dimensions and proposes corresponding indicators of landscape structure, in particular the degree of diversification and the mixing of intensive land uses, the distribution of the size of intensively used areas, the proportion of semi-natural areas (at least 10 %) and the interconnected arrangement of semi-natural areas. Furthermore, the paper discusses suitable reference units and existing data. Finally, we identify remaining gaps in the data basis and discuss the question of defining target values. Das Konzept der differenzierten Landnutzung wurde bereits vor 50 Jahren formuliert, um Biodiversität zu erhalten und die dazu erforderliche Landschaftsstruktur zu bewahren oder wiederherzustellen. Es ist zwar im Bundesnaturschutzgesetz verankert worden, aber es fehlt noch immer ein Monitoring seiner Umsetzung, obwohl der Sachverständigenrat für Umweltfragen dies seit 25 Jahren als notwendig einfordert. Der Beitrag argumentiert, dass die technischen Voraussetzungen für ein Monitoring der differenzierten Landnutzung heute bereitstehen, und diskutiert die dafür nötigen konzeptuellen Schritte. Es werden verschiedene Dimensionen bestimmt und entsprechende Indikatoren der Landschaftsstruktur vorgeschlagen, insbesondere zum Grad der Diversifizierung und der Durchmischung der intensiven Landnutzungen, zur Schlaggrößenverteilung intensiv genutzter Flächen, zum Flächenanteil naturnaher Flächen (mindestens 10 %) und zur vernetzten Anordnung der naturnahen Flächen. Des Weiteren diskutiert der Aufsatz geeignete Bezugseinheiten und vorhandene Daten. Abschließend werden verbleibende Lücken in den Datengrundlagen identifiziert und die Frage der Definition von Zielwerten erörtert.

The concept of ecosystem services has great potential to anchor nature conservation and species protection more firmly in a broader social debate. As an assessment framework, it illustrates the benefits of natural services in the broadest sense and is the subject of intense debate with regard to its scope and the operationalization required for spatial planning. In the sense of an integration into the social debate about the sustainable use of natural resources, the concept should be included in the canon of educational offers – beyond the ‘classical’ offers and topics of environmental education. This paper exemplifies how the concept is taught in school education (using the example of the Federal State of Saxony, Germany), and in higher education in selected subject areas in Germany as well as in the further education landscape for planning practitioners (in Germany, Austria and Switzerland). The paper shows approaches and deficits for a future goal-oriented operationalization of the concept. The focus is explicitly on environmental education and the provision of educational offers for actors in spatial planning, and reflects the current landscape of educational offers in the mentioned fields.

The ongoing growth of the field of transdisciplinary research primarily takes place in transformative practice when specific challenges and problems arise. Usually there is little space for conceptual and theoretical reflection. This paper offers a comprehensive frame of reference for the epistemological structure of transdisciplinary research. Based on the principle of sustainable development, the discussion focuses on the constitution of its research objects, the need for contextualization in the experimental practice, challenges and possibilities of generalization of the knowledge created and specifics of the methodology to be applied. This paper does not aim to reach a concluding diagnosis of these items, but rather adds to the further debate on the epistemological structure of trans disciplinary research. The authors thereby expect that the practice of transdisciplinarity and its position within the field of science will benefit from theoretical reflection.

Der vorliegende Beitrag diskutiert vor dem Hintergrund der gegenwärtigen Dominanz ökonomischer Akteure in der Entwicklung und dem Einsatz von Technik, inwiefern das Einstehen der Technikfolgenabschätzung (TA) für eine demokratische Gestaltung des technischen Wandels durch Wirtschaftsdemokratie erweitert werden könnte. Anschließend werden einige Grundlinien wirtschaftsdemokratischer Theorieansätze der Gegenwart präsentiert, um abschließend danach zu fragen, wie diese die Arbeit der TA konkret informieren und orientieren könnten. In light of the current dominance of economic actors in the development and application of technology, this paper discusses whether the commitment of technology assessment (TA) to democratizing technological change could or should be extended to include a commitment to economic democracy. Subsequently, we present some principles of contemporary theoretical approaches to economic democracy and finally ask how these could inform and orient the work of TA in concrete terms.