Providing Adaptive knowledge for Ratcheting up the EU Biodiversity strategy for Sustainable landscapes and protected areas

PAREUS will apply an innovative landscape approach to integrate policy and practice for multiple land uses to ensure equitable and sustainable use of land within a spatially explicit framework and in close collaboration with multiple stakeholders from multiple sectors to ensure the co-creation of knowledge. The project will explore different ways to create a coherent network of protected areas (PAs) for biodiversity where the wider countryside is also included. Through transnational and transdisciplinary research and national case studies PAREUS will address integrated, informed, inclusive, and adaptive policy measures development regarding PAs and other effective area-based conservation measures (OECM) supporting transformative governance by reconciling conservation and sustainable use of the land, as well as measures contributing to effectively protecting species in the wild. Futhermore PAREUS will assess the implementation of EU BDS2030 relevant targets regarding land management issues and its challenges within real landscapes. Identification of factors that prevent those targets from being implemented at the national scale, and how they may be crystalized into national strategies and relevant policies at the regional level within the country, allows authorities to administer the legal and economic incentives for PAs, and to realize a coherent network of PAs. By tackling the central challenge of biodiversity and land degradation from the perspective of transformative governance allows PAREUS to complement PA conservation with OECM approaches. PAREUS will develop a spatial planning tool that creates participatory visualizations for an engaging and informative future orientation of sustainable landscapes that will help EU member states and associate members to reach their own national biodiversity strategy, as well as the future Global Biodiversity Framework post-2020.