Adopting a cross-scale approach for the deployment of a green infrastructure

Exploring the effects of protected area networks on the European land system

The European Union's Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 seeks to protect 30% of land, with 10% under strict protection, while building a transnational nature network. We explore the effects of the Biodiversity Strategy targets for land use and ecosystem services across the European land system. To do so, we propose a novel approach, combining a methodological framework for improving green network connectivity with an EU-wide land system model. We identify an improved network of EU protected areas consistent with the 2030 targets, and explore its effects under different levels of protection and in a range of paired climatic and socio-economic scenarios. The existing network of protected areas is highly fragmented, with more than one third of its nodes being isolated. We find that prioritizing connectivity when implementing new protected areas could achieve the strategy's targets without compromising the future provision of ecosystem services, including food production, in Europe. However, we also find that EU-wide distributions of land uses and ecosystem services are influenced by the protected area network, and that this influence manifests differently in different climatic and socio-economic scenarios. Varying the strength of protection of the network had limited effects. Extractive services (food and timber production) decreased in protected areas, but non-extractive services increased, with compensatory changes occurring outside the network. Changes were small where competition for land was low and scenario conditions were benign, but became far larger and more extensive where competition was high and scenario conditions were challenging. Our findings highlight the apparent achievability of the EU's protected area targets, but also the need to account for adaptation in the wider land system and its consequences for spatial and temporal patterns of ecosystem services provision now and in the future.

How to account for nature-based tourism in Europe. An operational proposal

Europe is a leader in the tourism industry, with half of the world's international arrivals in 2018. Nowadays tourism activities related to the enjoyment of nature, Nature-based tourism (NBT), are amongst the main tourism markets worldwide. NBT represents both a challenge and an opportunity. In fact, on the one hand, it contributes to creating new markets and spurring job growth, especially for small businesses and, on the other hand, it might impact the environment and local communities. What's more, it is extremely difficult to quantify the role of nature in traditional economic accounting. In this context, the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) covers this gap by reporting information not included in the traditional system of economic accounts. The Central SEEA framework was adopted by the UN Statistical Commission in 2012 and the Ecosystem Accounting module (SEEA EA) has recently been adopted to quantify the role of ecosystems. In this study, we fine-tune a methodology applied to account for daily outdoor recreation to measure the contribution of nature to the tourism sector respecting the SEEA EA rules.

The approach was tested in Italy, which in 2019, had more than 430 million nights per year spent in the country for tourism. In our exploratory study, 56.69% (246 million) of the overnight stays were allocated to NBT. Our analysis shows that 43% (more than 30 million) of the overnight stays in the Veneto Region were allocated to nature; 75% (more than 39 million) in Trentino Alto Adige and 61.6% (29 million) in Tuscany.

The top ranked municipalities, with very high numbers of overnight stays and very low share of NBT are cities of art: namely: Venice (Veneto Region), Milan (Lombardy Region) and Florence (Tuscany Region) and sea locations on the Adriatic Sea, specifically San Michele al Tagliamento and Jesolo (Veneto Region). On the contrary, the top-ranked locations with very high numbers of overnight stays and very high share of NBT are mountain, lakes and sea locations that have natural protected areas or other key iconic landmarks in their proximity and endorsed specific types of travel accommodation, such as camp sites.

Based on our exploratory study, we argue that this approach allows us to disentangle the contribution of ecosystems to tourism. Not only is it compliant with the requests of the SEEA EA framework, but, thanks to the spatially-explicit outputs, it allows us to further explore the environmental and social impacts of tourism in a multi-scale perspective. In this study, a biophysical map developed at the EU level was used for illustrative purposes. In order to become operational at the national or local level, we suggest creating biophysical maps starting from local detailed datasets and, successively, to implement the methodology described in this paper.