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Nature-based solutions may actively reduce hydro-meteorological risks in urban areas as a part of climate change adaptation. However, the main reason for the increasing uptake of this type of solution is their many benefits for the local inhabitants, including recreational value. Previous studies on recreational value focus on studies of existing nature sites that are often much larger than what is considered as new NBS for flood adaptation studies in urban areas. We thus prioritized studies with smaller areas and nature types suitable for urban flood adaptation and divided them into four common nature types for urban flood adaptation: sustainable urban drainage systems, city parks, nature areas and rivers. We identified 23 primary valuation studies, including both stated and revealed preference studies, and derived two value transfer functions based on meta-regression analysis on existing areas. We investigated trends between values and variables and found that for the purpose of planning of new NBS the size of NBS and population density were determining factors of recreational value. For existing NBS the maximum travelling distance may be included as well. We find that existing state-of-the-art studies overestimate the recreational with more than a factor of 4 for NBS sizes below 5 ha. Our results are valid in a European context for nature-based solutions below 250 ha and can be applied across different NBS types and sizes.

Urban environments provide opportunities for greater resource efficiency and the fostering of urban ecosystems. Brownfield areas are a typical example of underused land resources. Brownfield redevelopment projects that include green infrastructure allow for further ecosystems to be accommodated in urban environments. Green infrastructure also deliver important urban ecosystem services (UES) to local residents, which can greatly contribute to improving quality of life in cities. In this case study, we quantify and assess the economic value of five UES for a brownfield redevelopment project in Antwerp, Belgium. The assessment is carried out using the “Nature Value Explorer” modelling tool. The case includes three types of green infrastructure (green corridor,infiltration gullies and green roofs) primarily intended to connect nature reserves on the urban periphery and to avoid surface runoff. The green infrastructure also provides air filtration, climate regulation, carbon sequestration and recreation ecosystem services. The value of recreation far exceeds other values, including the value of avoided runoff. The case study raises crucial questions as to whether existing UES valuation approaches adequately account for the range of UES provided and whether such approaches can be improved to achieve more accurate and reliable value estimates in future analyses.

The role of digital technologies for fostering sustainability and efficiency in forest-based supply chains is well acknowledged and motivated several studies in the scope of precision forestry. Sensor technologies can collect relevant data in forest-based supply chains, comprising all activities from within forests and the production of the woody raw material to its transformation into marketable forest-based products. Advanced planning systems can help to support decisions of the various entities in the supply chain, e.g., forest owners, harvest companies, haulage companies, and forest product processing industry. Such tools can help to deal with the complex interdependencies between different entities, often with opposing objectives and actions—which may increase efficiency of forest-based supply chains. This paper analyzes contemporary literature dealing with digital technologies in forest-based supply chains and summarizes the state-of-the-art digital technologies for real-time data collection on forests, product flows, and forest operations, as well as planning systems and other decision support systems in use by supply chain actors. Higher sustainability and efficiency of forest-based supply chains require a seamless information flow to foster integrated planning of the activities over the supply chain—thereby facilitating seamless data exchange between the supply chain entities and foster new forms of collaboration. Therefore, this paper deals with data exchange and multi-entity collaboration aspects in combination with interoperability challenges related with the integration among multiple process data collection tools and advanced planning systems. Finally, this interdisciplinary review leads to the discussion of relevant guidelines that can guide future research and integration projects in this domain.

How societies can cope with flood risk along coasts and riverbanks is a critical theoretical and empirical problem – particularly in the wake of anthropogenic climate change and the increased severity of floods. An example of this challenge is the growing costs of publicly-funded flood defense in Britain and popular outcries during the regular occasions that the British government fails to protect property and land during heavy rains. Traditional approaches to institutional analysis suggest that flood management is either a public good that only the government is competent to provide or a private good to which individual landowners are ultimately responsible for supplying. We argue that an important cause of failure in flood management is mismatched property rights. This is where the scale of natural events and resources fail to align with the scale of human activities, responsibility and ownership. Moreover, the spatial dimensions of floods mean that their management is often appropriately conceptualized as a common pool resource problem. As a result, commons institutions as conceptualized and observed by Elinor Ostrom are likely to be major contributors to effective flood management. What governance process should decide the size and scope of these institutions? We argue that bottom-up responses to problems of mismatched property rights are facilitated within larger societies that are characterized by market processes. Moreover, the wider presence of price signals delivers to local communities essential knowledge about the cost of maintaining private property and the relative scarcity of the communal goods. We discuss how our theoretical positions align with experience in Britain and what the implications of our theoretical approach are for facilitating the development of better institutions.

Abstract Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies of products with a major part of their life cycle in biological production systems (i.e. forestry and agriculture) are often incomplete because the assessment of the land use impact is not operational. Most method proposals include the quality of the land in a descriptive way using rank scores for an arbitrarily selected set of indicators. This paper first offers a theoretical framework for the selection of suitable indicators for land use impact assessment, based on ecosystem thermodynamics. According to recent theories on the thermodynamics of open systems, a goal function of ecosystems is to maximize the dissipation of exogenic exergy fluxes by maximizing the internal exergy storage under form of biomass, biodiversity and complex trophical networks. Human impact may decrease this ecosystem exergy level by simplification, i.e. decreasing biomass and destroying internal complexity. Within this theoretical framework, we then studied possibilities for assessing the land use impact in a more direct way by measuring the ecosystems' capacity to dissipate solar exergy. Measuring ecosystem thermal characteristics by using remote sensing techniques was considered a promising tool. Once operational, it could offer a quick and cheap alternative to quantify land use impacts in any terrestrial ecosystem of any size. Recommendations are given for further exploration of this method and for its integration into an ISO compatible LCA framework.

Smallholders are crucial for global sustainability given their importance to food and nutritional security, agriculture, and biodiversity conservation. Worldwide smallholders are subject to expanded telecoupling whereby their social-ecological systems are linked to large-scale socioeconomic and environmental drivers. The present research uses the synthesis of empirical evidence to demonstrate smallholder telecoupling through the linkages stemming from the global-level integration of markets (commodity, labor, finance), urbanization, governance, and technology. These telecoupling forces are often disadvantageous to smallholders while certain conditions can contribute to the potential sustainability of their social-ecological systems. Case studies were chosen to describe sustainability opportunities and limits involving smallholder production and consumption of high-agrobiodiversity Andean maize amid telecoupled migration (Bolivia), the role of international eco-certification in smallholder coffee-growing and agroforests (Colombia), smallholder organic dairy production in large-scale markets and technology transfer (upper Midwest, U.S.A.), and smallholders' global niche commodity production of argan oil (Morocco). These case studies are used to identify the key challenges and opportunities faced by smallholders in telecoupling and to develop a conceptual framework. This framework specifies the integrated roles of global systems together with influential public and private institutions operating at multiple scales including the national level. The framework also integrates the local dynamics of smallholders' multiple land use units and their socioeconomic and environmental variation. Spatial spillover effects in smallholder landscapes are an additional element. This framework further establishes the un-Romantic, nonteleological, and antifetishistic view of smallholders. It provides specific insights on the multilevel dynamics of smallholder telecoupling and potential sustainability opportunities that can strengthen livelihoods, biodiversity conservation, and food and nutritional security. These insights are concluded to be valuable to environmental, agricultural, and food scientists and scholars (both biogeophysical sciences and social sciences), policy makers, institutional analysts, development specialists and practitioners, social justice activists, and others seeking to advance global sustainability including sustainable development.

This article reinterprets open space as the theatre of adaptive regimes in the interfering wakes of two major waves of transformation: the agricultural and the urban transformation. The aim of the wave regime concept is to accommodate traditional and emerging land uses in a logical scheme of co-existing regimes separated by transition waves in space and time. Each wave corresponds to a transitional stage from one set to another set of value regime, which by the agents of the transformation is interpreted as a major value increase. The current struggle for space and the difficult interpretations of quality and sustainability can be explained as expressions of competition between value regimes. These value regimes tend to be driven and perpetuated by customary paradigms of land-use planning and management (urban planning, ecology, agronomy, etc.). Land-use sectors ask for rather unambiguous definitions and clear use rights of land use categories and zoning, leaving limited possibility for interaction, mixed regimes and innovative multifunctional land-use. New service demands, new sustainability and resilience urgencies challenge these customary land-use planning paradigms and their rules and instruments. This paper acknowledges a third wave and consequent fourth regime. This regime seeks overall increased sustainability and resilience in open spaces, stressing the strategic importance of unsealed soils and other life conditioning substrates. Different existing land-use models, such as “transition towns”, “agroforestry” and many more, can be interpreted as fourth regime examples, but altogether there is a need for more coordination or integration to turn the third wave concept into a real “wave”. A specific target is to scan territories for characteristics and values according to the prevailing regimes, and assess each unit in terms of third wave transition opportunities, even within active uses that may be at odds with customary rules and expectations. This is illustrated for cases of illegal intake of farmland for non-agricultural activities and for domestic gardens as a missing category in customary rural and land use policy.