Increasing biodiversity and climate change resilience in Dutch landscapes
Climate conditions, the state of nature, and human well-being are interconnected and continuously changing.
In COMBINED, we study climate, nature and human interactions in landscapes with grasslands, forests, and urban nature in an integrated way. Through this approach, we aim for an impact in which Dutch landscapes recover their biodiversity, become climate resilient and provide a healthy living environment. We focus on these landscapes as they cover a large part of the Netherlands and have a large potential to contribute to this impact: multifunctional resilient grasslands can benefit people and nature, forests are a key component of climate mitigation and adaptation strategies and our urban environment has the potential to create healthy environments for people and nature. A cross-discipline, cross-scale approach for these ecosystems and their connections enables us to steer and support their management and design, but is still lacking.
To reach this impact, COMBINED aims to:
- Unravel how changes in biodiversity and climate interact in Dutch landscapes.
- Evaluate the effects of existing measures and strategies on biodiversity recovery, climate mitigation and adaptation, and ecosystem services.
- Identify what social, political and institutional obstacles influence the implementation of such measures and strategies and how they can be removed and by whom.
Our consortium works toward these envisioned breakthroughs: i) harmonized methods to understand climate change and biodiversity recovery, leading to knowledge on the transferability of these approaches and the ability to model the impact of future interventions, ii) critical analysis, studying why, in the face of well-known problems, changes in management have not taken place contributes to the robustness and actionability of our results, and iii) broadly supported visions on future landscape management to break through lock-in in current policies, to make space for successful, adaptive, and integrated management and policy options.
Let's #Combine strengths
Whether you work in the design and management of landscapes at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, Food Security and Nature, provinces, or land-owning organizations, follow us online or join one of our events to find out how we can together increase landscape multi-functionality for biodiversity and climate change resilience.
A joint effort
In COMBINED, we aim for an impact in which Dutch landscapes recover their biodiversity, become climate resilient, and provide a healthy living environment working with a vast network of partners.
COMBINED is a project of the Dutch Research Agenda (NWA) programme Climate and Nature which is the initiative of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fishery, Food Quality, and Nature.