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The achievement of a radical global reduction of greenhouse gases requires a legal-institutional setting capable of facilitating such a transition on a wide range of renewable technologies. This pa...

This paper offers an approach to long-term planning for an industrial sector that is sensitive to climate change, the state of adjacent natural environments and the associated socioeconomic developments. The paper combines exploratory and target-seeking scenarios to understand the future challenges of nature-based blue tourism under alternative global futures, and to develop sequences of actions to accomplish the best achievable future outcome for blue tourism at a local scale. We detail a bottom-up approach to scenario development for tourism, with local stakeholders developing local scenarios within the boundaries provided by the locally extended Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), widely used in climate research. As a demonstration of the approach, a group of invited stakeholders developed locally extended scenario narratives and the adaptation plans for blue tourism for coastal areas surrounding the Helsinki metropolitan area in Finland. The co-creation process yielded several recommendations for immediate action concerning protection of the coastal environments, land use planning, internal communication with the sector and coordinated monitoring of economic, ecological, social and cultural sustainability indicators. The approach offers a way forward for systematically assessing the future risks and opportunities that a changing environment and society create for blue tourism. • Exploratory and normative scenarios are combined to study future challenges of blue tourism. • Locally extended SSPs provide the boundaries for adapting to changing climate and societal conditions. • A group of stakeholders developed scenario narratives and adaptation plans for coastal Helsinki. • Consistent land use and marine spatial planning are keys to safeguarding future opportunities.

The speed and uncertainty of environmental change in the Anthropocene challenge the capacity of coevolving social–ecological–technological systems (SETs) to adapt or transform to these changes. Formal government and legal structures further constrain the adaptive capacity of our SETs. However, new, self-organized forms of adaptive governance are emerging at multiple scales in natural resource-based SETs. Adaptive governance involves the private and public sectors as well as formal and informal institutions, self-organized to fill governance gaps in the traditional roles of states. While new governance forms are emerging, they are not yet doing so rapidly enough to match the pace of environmental change. Furthermore, they do not yet possess the legitimacy or capacity needed to address disparities between the winners and losers from change. These emergent forms of adaptive governance appear to be particularly effective in managing complexity. We explore governance and SETs as coevolving complex systems, focusing on legal systems to understand the potential pathways and obstacles to equitable adaptation. We explore how governments may facilitate the emergence of adaptive governance and promote legitimacy in both the process of governance despite the involvement of nonstate actors, and its adherence to democratic values of equity and justice. To manage the contextual nature of the results of change in complex systems, we propose the establishment of long-term study initiatives for the coproduction of knowledge, to accelerate learning and synergize interactions between science and governance and to foster public science and epistemic communities dedicated to navigating transitions to more just, sustainable, and resilient futures.

Land-use conflicts can be costly and time-consuming and cause social burden to all parties. In this study, we developed an approach for mapping synergy and conflict potential between land uses and tested it on nature protection, nature-based tourism, forestry and mining. First, we calculated the ecological and socio-cultural values for the study area, and further the economic values related to forestry and mining. Second, we conducted an integrated spatial assessment of these values and used it jointly with a variant of a value compatibility analysis to locate areas with possible synergistic and conflicting land uses. This study was carried out in Finnish Lapland where land use conflicts have occurred due to the need to develop forestry and mining in areas that are also important for nature-based tourism. The method operated well as it identified sites with ongoing land-use disputes. Synergy potential between biodiversity and socio-cultural values was identified in protected areas and other sites of natural beauty, and conflict potential concerning forestry near tourist resorts and concerning mining at proposed mining project sites. The developed framework can assist in locating sites that may need proactive measurements to avoid conflicts, and sites that would benefit from multi-purpose management thereby supporting sustainable and adaptive land-use planning.

•Social issues have ever-increasing importance in mining industry.•SLO and CSR have similar aims from slightly different angles.•Arranging communication between communities and companies should be obligatory.•Binding agreements between companies and communities demand clear definitions.

This paper highlights the shortcomings of the mainstream utility economic approach to the private law pillar of ‘property’ in fostering socially desirable developments, such as sustainability, important in the context of the circular economy (CE). In this exercise, we take the examples of two prominent private law regimes, namely intellectual property and property laws. We shed light over specific issues related inter alia to acts of repairing, reusing and leasing, where in particular these selected private law fields are currently failing to provide the incentives needed for directing innovations and businesses towards more sustainable types of model. We argue that this mainstream utility approach to property has become untenable in a world where the impact of both tangible and intellectual property law frameworks on ecological integrity should actually be prioritized. As we then show, legal practices that reflect more social planning types of theory might better facilitate a smoother and swifter transition towards the CE. This switch would also better align private law regimes with some of the noble goals already included in public areas of law, that way putting the two frameworks more in harmony towards achieving a European sustainable CE.

Environmental and conservation decisions are often complex, which results in complexity also in policy assessments. Conservation decisions have implications for different stakeholders and typically draw on multidisciplinary knowledge bases, incorporating natural, physical and social sciences, politics and ethics. Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) is a potentially important tool for supporting conservation policy decisions. This article reports a spatially referenced MCDA of policy instrument scenarios for conserving forest biodiversity in Southwestern Finland. The effects of the realistic policy instruments designed in dialogue with stakeholders included voluntary permanent conservation, enforced spatially concentrated permanent conservation, voluntary permanent conservation with active nature management, and voluntary temporary conservation. These instruments were compared by combining forest-owner survey, MCDA and ex ante impact evaluation. The main objective was to find the forest biodiversity conservation instrument that would produce the highest total benefit. The effects of the different instruments were evaluated with ecological, economic, social, and institutional criteria after a 20-year time period. The results showed minor differences between the instruments, with voluntary permanent and voluntary temporary conservation producing the largest total benefit. Despite the small differences, the analysis was robust in showing that voluntary instruments were more favourable than enforced permanent conservation.

This article analyses the legal adaptive capacity for increasing sustainable fish aquaculture production in EU-Finland. Currently, fish aquaculture is driven by increasing global demand of fish, declining natural fisheries, food security and blue growth policies. At the same time, environmental policies such as the EU Water Framework Directive and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive set tightening legal-ecological requirements for the industry's nutrient emissions. Against this background, the success of blue growth policies related to aquaculture – and the hope of reconciling competing interests at sea – boil down to measures available for dealing with excess nutrients. In line with the mitigation hierarchy, the article establishes four alternative pathways for the fish aquaculture industry to grow without increasing its environmental nutrient footprint significantly, and evaluates the legal adaptive capacity and the legal risks attached to these pathways. peerReviewed

The development of mining and other resource-based industries are among key drivers of economic development in the Arctic. The fragile environment and the presence of nature-based livelihoods and indigenous communities pose challenges for mining development. Mining operations should be optimized so that the profitability is maintained in changing market conditions and to meet increasing societal and environmental demands. In this study we present the current understanding on the interplay between mining and the surrounding socio-ecological systems in the Arctic region. The existing academic literature on the Arctic region was reviewed, covering 127 peer-reviewed publications since 2000. We investigated the mining activities from four perspectives examining: 1) environmental, 2) economic, 3) social and 4) legal dimensions, covering three life-cycle stages: 1) pre-mining, 2) mining, and 3) post-mining. The publications on the environmental and economic aspects focused principally on the impacts of mining, whereas social and legal publications discussed the interaction between people and their rights and ways of controlling their environment. Besides the need for more balanced research between different life-cycle stages we uncovered five research gaps concerning the knowledge base needed to increase the sustainability of Arctic mining: 1) impacts and adaptation to climate change, 2) monitoring the sustainability of mining using standardized indicators, 3) holistic economic assessment of mining, 4) social sustainability and conflict management, and 5) mechanisms that mitigate or compensate for the adverse effects of mining on biodiversity.

There are many techniques to deal with uncertainty when modeling data. However, there are many forms of uncertainty that cannot be dealt with mathematically that have to be taken into account when designing a biodiversity monitoring system. Some of these can be minimized by careful planning and quality control, but others have to be investigated during monitoring, and the scale and methods adjusted when necessary to meet objectives. Sources of uncertainty include uncertainty about stakeholders, who will monitor, what to sample, where to sample, causal relationships, species identifications, detectability, distributions, relationships with remote sensing, biotic concordance, complementarity, validity of stratification, and data quality and management. Failure to take into account any of these sources of uncertainty about how the data will be used can make monitoring nothing more than monitoring for the sake of monitoring, and I make recommendations as to how to reduce uncertainties. Some form of standardization is necessary, despite the multiple sources of uncertainty, and experience from RAPELD and other monitoring schemes indicates that spatial standardization is viable and helps reduce many sources of uncertainty. Copyright William E Magnusson.

Although the concepts of institutions in economics and institutional analysis have been integrated in recent writings about payments for ecosystem services (PES), their joint operationalization and testing have been limited. To tackle this integration challenge, we empirically explore how Finnish non-industrial private forest owners' perceptions about voluntary biodiversity conservation contracting correspond with the institutional theories about PES. Further, we test whether the perceptions are related to PES contracting in the past or in the future. The results of the explorative factor analyses corresponded with the theoretical considerations of both economics and institutional analysis. The logistic regression analyses showed that the factors that related to past contracting differed notably from those that explained future intentions to contract. Most consistently, perceptions about positive ecological impacts were positively related to past contracting, while social and moral normative perceptions had a negative effect. In other words, those who would conserve nature for altruistic reasons tended not to have entered a contract but rather stayed out. Local and social welfare expectations increased the willingness to contract in the future. Our analysis highlights the importance of normative conservation justifications as well as the expectations regarding non-economic benefits and welfare impacts for PES design and analysis.

Agricultural intensification is a major driver of biodiversity decline throughout Europe. Agri-environment schemes governed by EU regulation are a significant tool in combating this decline but despite high spending, experiences of their effectiveness have been mixed. Their effectiveness might be improved by targeting them to locations with high biodiversity value, and particularly by spatial coordination to enhance habitat connectivity and the associated ecological processes, such as dispersal. We show, with an example of semi-natural grassland conservation in South-Western Finland, how spatial conservation planning tools, here the Zonation software, could help in assessing the habitat connectivity and allocating management actions. We assign highest priority to sites that have been classified as nationally important and that have been under management, and let connectivity influence the Zonation prioritizations. According to Zonation outputs, 25–30% of highest-ranking grasslands in our study area are without management contracts, indicating weak connectivity of managed sites, whereas Natura 2000 areas are spatially better located. A 50% expansion of the current network would be adequate to bring its value close to that of a network created from scratch, but as the contracts are temporary, reallocation of the contracts from the least valuable, funded sites to more valuable, unfunded ones would be even more effective. Current policy instruments supporting farmland biodiversity are strongly constrained by EU regulation, and appear to be too inflexible to take the spatial differences in conservation values into account. Better communication and incentives to encourage farmer participation to these voluntary programs are needed.

This article analyzes the influence of the preexisting institutional basis on designing and implementing new biodiversity and ecosystem services policies. The way that regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive institutions condition the currently popular payments for ecosystem services (PES) is analyzed by exploring the evolution of a championed forest biodiversity PES scheme in Finland. Our analysis of the evolution of the PES demonstrates several constraints on new policies. Based on policy documents and secondary material, we show how the policies that seemingly take effect through regulative institutional changes are conditioned by normative and cultural-cognitive institutions. Administrative and professional rigidities can be broken with a light policy experiment but for longer term governance development, radical institutional changes are necessary. The applied institutional framework demonstrates the analytical opportunities that attention to institutions generates for deepening the generally o...

Many environmental services are not traded in markets but are rather public goods and their supply cannot easily be motivated by the market forces. This leads to underinvestment in the public goods relative to what would be socially desirable. Financial instruments are designed to modify behaviour by encouraging private individuals, organisations and businesses to participate actively in conservation. Nation states are ultimately responsible for providing public goods but the competition rules of the European Union restrict the use of economic instruments that constitute ‘state aid’ as defined in the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). This article will analyse the regulatory frames under which economic incentives may constitute state aid in the meaning of 107 TFEU and the terms and conditions on which these aids may still be granted for land-owners.

International audience; One of the core challenges of biodiversity conservation is to better understand the interconnectedness and interactions of scales in ecological and governance processes. hese interrelationships constitute not only a complex analytical challenge but they also open up a channel for deliberative discussions and knowledge exchange between and among various societal actors which may themselves be operating at various scales, such as policy makers, land use planners, members of NGOs, and researchers. In this paper, we discuss and integrate the perspectives of various disciplines academics and stakeholders who participated in a workshop on scales of European biodiversity governance organised in Brussels in the autumn of 2010. he 23 participants represented various governmental agencies and NGOs from the European, national, and sub-national levels. he data from the focus group discussions of the workshop were analysed using qualitative content analysis. he core scale-related challenges of biodiversity policy identiied by the participants were cross-level and cross-sector limitations as well as ecological, social and social-ecological complexities that potentially lead to a variety of scale-related mismatches. As ways to address these challenges the participants highlighted innovations, and an aim to develop new interdisciplinary approaches to support the processes aiming to solve current scale challenges.

The aim of the article is to identify and analyse innovative statutory regulation to address the challenges of biodiversity conservation, especially in relation to private forests. Four countries (Finland, Sweden, France and Australia) are scanned for innovative approaches and the identified instruments are classified into five categories according to the level and intensity of government interference. Advantages and drawbacks of the different instrument types related to their effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, fairness and acceptability are examined from a theoretical point of view. Compared to traditional measures of nature conservation, the examined innovative instruments provide for more flexibility relating to the nature of restrictions, scope, implementation or adjustability. This is aimed at improving acceptability among regulatees while upholding various degrees of government interference. On the basis of our analysis, innovations to address specific biodiversity challenges may be identified and new solutions developed.

Environmental law increasingly provides for participatory rights, including appeal rights, to ensure informed, legitimate decision-making. Despite consensus around the general need for participatory rights, including strong ones such as a right to appeal, public participation in environmental decision-making is often criticised. The critics' main argument is that the negative side effects resulting particularly from the use of strong participatory rights outweigh their benefits. Recent regulatory trends arising from better regulation policy to make environmental decision-making more cost-efficient tend to pay special attention to such arguments despite limited empirical evidence. This article provides evidence using material-concerning appeals against pollution permits in Finland and suggests that judicial review is a necessary and effective process for both protecting citizens' rights and improving the quality of environmental protection.

Successful public conservation policies at various governmental levels have increased some populations of protected species to the extent that they are causing damage to human activities, like fisheries. As a reaction public authorities are developing biodiversity reconciliation policies. Finland and Germany have both created reconciliation policies for the conflicts between nature conservation and fisheries including a package of measures like management of population, support of technical measures and various types of compensation payments. All these measures are affected by European policy and law, though no special reconciliation policy has been adopted at European level. This article explores the options European regulation offers and the restrictions it imposes on Member States. Based on experiences with German and Finnish biodiversity reconciliation policies, the interrelationship between European and national regulation is elaborated, leading to suggestions for better coordination of reconciliation policies between different governmental levels.

Evaluation of recently introduced policy instruments (RIPIs) is especially problematic, because only some effects have occurred, and information on them is imperfect. Policy makers and the public at large are, however, particularly interested in early evaluations. This article examines problems with the retrospective evaluation of RIPIs, and explores the advantages of using intervention theories in these evaluations. Two case studies from the field of environmental policy instruments are used as examples. It is argued that when evidence on final outcomes is largely unavailable, an intervention theory is a useful tool to overcome information problems. By using intervention theories, it is possible to identify observable prerequisites that precede intended, but not yet occurred, outcomes.

The governance of global environmental challenges has been conceptualized comprehensively and often accurately, but it is often difficult to design institutions that provide incentives for conservation and, at the same time, control for reaching the targets across scales, utilizing available knowledge and satisfying multiple interests. This chapter analyses four governance mechanisms in biodiversity conservation: (i) command and control; (ii) planning and management: (iii) market-oriented mechanisms and economic instruments; and (iv) collaborative and participatory. It discusses the ways in which these mechanisms emphasize control and adaptiveness. The analysis utilizes governance literature and secondary material on illustrative biodiversity governance examples in different areas in Europe. The chapter draws conclusions for scale-sensitive and scale-effective analysis and policy

This chapter focuses on the legal and institutional framework that is relevant for the reconciliation of human-wildlife conflicts. The identification of the framework is important, because laws, regulations and norms may impose severe restrictions for reconciliation policies, but also because they open avenues of action. The legal and institutional framework involves governmental levels from local to international as well as different policy sectors from nature conservation and hunting to trade and competition. Relevant governmental levels and policy sectors vary greatly, depending on the conflict and national politico-administrative traditions. Presentation of the framework is organized by using three categories of possible policy instrument types that progress from stringent to least binding measures: “nature conservation regulation”, “economic instruments” and “information and training”.

This Editorial presents the focus, scope and policies of the inaugural issue of Nature Conservation, a new open access, peer-reviewed journal bridging natural sciences, social sciences and hands-on applications in conservation management. The journal covers all aspects of nature conservation and aims particularly at facilitating better interaction between scientists and practitioners. The journal will impose no restrictions on manuscript size or the use of colour. We will use an XML-based editorial workflow and several cutting-edge innovations in publishing and information dissemination. These include semantic mark-up of, and enhancements to published text, data, and extensive cross-linking within the journal and to external sources. We believe the journal will make an important contribution to better linking science and practice, offers rapid, peer-reviewed and flexible publication for authors and unrestricted access to content. The journal Nature Conservation was established within the framework of the European Union's Framework Program 7 large-integrated project SCALES: Securing the Conservation of biodiversity across Administrative Levels and spatial, temporal, and Ecological Scales, www.scales-project.net (grant 226852; Henle et al. 2010).

International audience; Biodiversity conservation measures and biological processes often do not match in scale. The EU funded project SCALES (Securing the Conservation of biodiversity across Administrative Levels and spatial, temporal, and Ecological Scales) is intended to solve this challenge. SCALES analyses how selected pressures (climate change, habitat loss, fragmentation, disturbance), their drivers, and their impacts on biodiversity change with spatial and temporal scale. The project develops methods for a better understanding of scaling properties of biological processes from the genetic level to populations, communities, and ecosystem functions. SCALES also seeks ways to integrate the issue of scale into policy, decision-making, and biodiversity management, focusing on networks of protected areas, regional connectivity, and biodiversity monitoring.

Biodiversity conservation measures and biological processes often do not match in scale. The EU funded project SCALES (Securing the Conservation of biodiversity across Administrative Levels and spatial, temporal, and Ecological Scales) is intended to solve this challenge. SCALES analyses how selected pressures (climate change, habitat loss, fragmentation, disturbance), their drivers, and their impacts on biodiversity change with spatial and temporal scale. The project develops methods for a better understanding of scaling properties of biological processes from the genetic level to populations, communities, and ecosystem functions. SCALES also seeks ways to integrate the issue of scale into policy, decision-making, and biodiversity management, focusing on networks of protected areas, regional connectivity, and biodiversity monitoring.