Planning Multifunctional Measures for Efficient Landscape Management: Quantifying and Comparing the Added Value of Integrated and Segregated Management Concepts - Landscape Ecology for Sustainable Environment and Culture - page 240

13.1 Introduction
Environmental planning and funding schemes are organized primarily by sectoral
administrations that have different constituencies and diverse competencies. This
situation produces uncoordinated approaches to environmental management that
focus on separate ecosystem compartments, such as water, biodiversity or soil.
River basin management, habitat networks planning and concepts for soil pro-
tection and restoration exemplify such approaches. Even in comprehensive envi-
ronmental planning such as landscape planning (according to the European
Landscape Convention (Council of Europe 2000 ) and German landscape plans),
multifunctional measures are not deduced systematically and their added value is
not assessed. Instead, landscape planners employ experience and intuition in
combination with stakeholder input in order to identify multifunctional areas and
management measures (von Haaren and Galler 2013 ).
Clearly, a better scientific basis and method for selecting multifunctional mea-
sures and assessing their added value would be most helpful for applying an
integrative concept in practice. Furthermore, such findings could support integra-
tive approaches in environmental management that could promote more efficient
use of public money. More specifically, the consideration of cost-benefit ratios of
measures or the ratio between benefit and the amount of land required for imple-
mentation force planners to focus on the efficiency of their plans. Planners must
consider the amount of land required for improvement measures and how exclu-
sively it is dedicated to environmental purposes, because land is a scarce resource.
A very relevant application for such optimization concepts is, for example, the
design of agri-environmental measures in the Common Agricultural Policy.
Current scientific research employs different definitions of multifunctionality.
In agricultural policy, multifunctionality is used to describe societal and non-
commodity functions that are provided by farmers in addition to agricultural
products. Increasingly, the EU interprets multifunctionality of agriculture as a
justification for continued financial support of farmers to renumerate them for the
provision of non-commodity outputs (Marsden and Sonnino 2008 ). In landscape
sciences, multifunctionality is understood more broadly as the capacities of
landscapes (and not only agricultural land uses) to simultaneously provide several
ecological and socio-economic functions (cf. e.g. Helming and Wiggering 2003 ;
Mander et al. 2007 ). Here, multifunctionality has been interpreted as a general
objective for landscape development (cf. Brandt et al. 2000 ).
This research focusses on the multifunctionality of landscape management
measures. This is understood as the positive effects of measures on the provision of
multiple landscape functions. Landscape functions are defined as the capacity of a
landscape and its subspaces to sustainably fulfill basic, lasting and socially legit-
imised material or immaterial human demands (von Haaren and Albert 2011 ). This