Landbouw en landgebruik in internationaal perspectief Voorwoord

the first objective of land use, with agricultural production in the conventional sense as the
secondary objective. This could have profound implications for many parts of Europe where
agriculture is inherently unprofitable and only maintained by public support.
Several contributions to the seminar have described other potential attributes of this model -
Sara Scherr's maxim of 'getting biomass in, rather than taking biomass out', and the notion of
substituting natural capital (the capacity for producing ecosystem services) for financial
capital. There is much to be done to develop and refine the model, and perhaps even more to
communicate it - because it will count for very little unless it can be shared by land users,
policy makers, and preferably by the wider European public.
Markets have a vital function in meeting our objectives for mitigating climate change and
achieving food security and energy security. We need to recognise this and use market forces
constructively. The seminar has drawn attention to how market mechanisms can be developed
as a way of incentivising the management of ecosystem services. In particular there appears to
be strong general support for a much expanded system of environmental taxation.
If some of these ecosystem services, particularly those responsible for the stability of the
climate, are issues of human survival, perhaps they should cause us to reconsider our
approach to regulation and how we intervene in markets. If something is so very important,
can we afford to leave it to a voluntary approach where land managers make free choices in
response to largely unregulated markets?
A system of regulation that might be able to achieve the necessary balance between the
demands of food security, energy supply and the purer environmental public goods (which
may or may not include action to counteract climate change) is likely to involve land use
planning. This is easy to say, but at this stage most of us have only a vague notion of what a
land use plan or, perhaps more importantly, a strategy for implementing it would look like.
This seminar has raised many challenges that a land use plan would need to address:
the integration of multiple functions and objectives. 'If you take ecosystem services one at a
time, you get things completely wrong', as the environment discussion group pointed out;
taking global and trans-national factors into account;
setting targets, based on a shift from trade-offs to synergies or, at least, 'shifting the tradeoff
curve' (Sara Scherr);
matching the balance of outcomes to the natural capacity for producing them - 'working with
nature';
building on the potential of new technology as the means of making more efficient use of
environmental resources;
involving stakeholders, and developing ownership of the process.
An essential prerequisite for such a plan will be the ability to attach a value to the outcomes
for which we are planning - requiring not only the application of new techniques, but also the
substantial adjustment of perceptions.
Returning to the global recession, even while its full impact is not yet apparent there are some
lessons we can learn from it about Europe's land use and environment. First, it reinforces our
awareness of land use as a global environmental issue; it shows us that there can be events on
a global scale with the potential for a major influence on the environment that are beyond the
reach of our modelling and scenario-building. Second, it points to continuing unpredictability