Using Ecosystem Services in Community-Based Landscape Planning: Science is Not Ready to Deliver - Landscape Ecology for Sustainable Environment and Culture - page 82

2. Change results in added value. Humans change the pattern of the landscape to
gain more benefits, or prevent loss of value due to external causes. The change
creates added value. This principle implies a definition of change and why
change is done. Because the landscape is spatially heterogeneous, the added
value of change is spatially variable across the landscape mosaic.
3. Landscape change is community-based. This principle characterizes the social
process of landscape change planning. Individuals differ in the benefits they
use, hence in their motive for change. They also live in different parts, where
they may own different parts of the landscape mosaic. Landscape change
creates different values in different places, perceived differently by members of
the local community, and costs of change are spatially variable. Moreover, a
change at one site may affect the value at other sites. Therefore, decision
making about adapting landscapes is a collaborative process aiming for an even
distribution of costs and benefits among stakeholders, hence with a strong
responsibility

in the local community (community-based environmental

governance).
4. Multi-scale perspective. The environmental system is hierarchically structured
along a spatial scale, including the local landscape spatial level. Hence, the
pattern-process relationships at the landscape level interact with and are
influenced by processes at higher levels of scale. Sustainability calls for taking
into account implications of local level change on ecological and socio-eco-
nomic processes elsewhere in the hierarchy of scale levels. Because local
values depend on relationships with surrounding landscape systems, local goal
setting and design should be based on the opportunities and constraints offered
by these surroundings.
5. Long term perspective. Sustainable use means utilizing the benefits of land-
scape services while maintaining the potential of the landscape to provide these
resources to future generations. A widely accepted basic idea of sustainability is
that resources are not depleted but remain available for future generations (the
well-known principle of intergenerational equity). Because biodiversity plays a
key role in many landscape services and because biodiversity depends on the
spatial pattern of ecosystems in the landscape, managing the spatial cohesion of
the ecosystem network for long term viability of a substantial amount of species
(Opdam et al. 2003 ) is conditional to a sustainable use of landscape resources.
6. Resilient to fluctuations. Services link the ecological to the human system. Both
are inherently variable over time, due to internal variability and to external
influences, such as weather fluctuations, climate change and water system
variability, and on the social system side change of political power and
evolving public views on the value of landscape. Therefore, all the decisions
made about change according to the first five principles are very much subject
to uncertainty. Concepts that have been proposed to deal with uncertainty in
environmental governance are resilience and adaptive capacity (Walker et al.
2004 ). Thus, sustainable landscape management aims for ensuring that the
physical landscape is resilient to resist or absorb unintended change without
losing its capacity to provide desired services (Vos et al. submitted). Resilience