Conservation and Sustainable Use of the Biosphere - WBGU

196 E Diversity of landscapes and ecosystems
and presented among the ‘best practice’ projects.The
follow-up process to HABITAT II should be considered
to be a successful strategy for overcoming negative
environmental changes that is worthy of imitation
and support because of the quality of the results
and the resultant interlinkages between international,
national and local institutions.
The current EU research programmes attach high
importance to sustainable urban development.
Although we are still far from an efficient and creative
European network of scientists, local politicians
and authorities, the most recent report by the European
Commission on the results of research in 160
projects in the 3rd and 4th Framework Programme
provides many new findings on the socio-economic
aspects of environmental changes, which open up
good perspectives for integrated sustainability
research in European cities (European Commission,
1998).
E 3.9
Integrating conservation and use at the regional
level
E 3.9.1
Experience and deficits
The case studies from the Central European cultivated
landscape, Amazonia, Lake Victoria and the
Indonesian shallow seas described in Section E 2
showed how complex these landscapes are and how
varied the intensity and extent of human interventions
in these ecosystems can be. The examples also
clearly demonstrate that an exploitation of biological
resources which ignores the long-term impacts leads
to overexploitation and mismanagement, jeopardizing
the resource base in the long term (Chapter G).
In the cases described there is a discrepancy
between the lofty aspirations at global level, for
example as worded in Article 1 of the Biodiversity
Convention (Section I 3), and local practice. First of
all, the Parties are directly responsible for implementation
of the Convention. However, deficits in the
application of the principles of the Convention can
be seen both in industrialized and developing countries.
In the following, two extreme examples will be
taken from the continuum of different institutional
and natural geographic framework conditions.
In the case studies on the use of biological
resources in developing countries, it can be seen that
national governments in countries with large land
areas frequently have too little interest in events a
long way away from the capital (Amazonia, Section
E 2.2) or lack the power to effectively implement
statutory provisions locally (Indonesian shallow seas;
Section E 2.4). The property rights for the biological
resources are often in the hands of the state or a small
number of private owners. An adequate knowledge
base as well as structural, personnel and financial
capacities for planning are unlikely to be in place and
planning decisions are usually made centrally and
not locally. Due to the great distance separating the
decision-making from the implementation, there is
no feedback of locally available knowledge to spatial
planning authorities. Poorly-equipped and insufficiently
linked institutions have no way of reviewing
or enforcing the implementation of planning objectives.
This ‘implementation vacuum’ leads to action
being taken on the basis of short-term economic
interests, disregarding the sustainability of use.
By contrast, even well-developed systems of
regional planning in industrialized countries extending
down to local authority level and including the
designation of protected areas with a clearly defined
status have not been able to guarantee adequate
implementation of the objectives of conservation
and sustainable use of the biosphere. One problem
here is that, in practice, the burden of proof necessary
to demonstrate the need for proposed interventions
on economic grounds is frequently much lower than
that demanded for nature conservation to ensure the
prevention of an intervention or the designation of a
protected area. The piecemeal and small-scale conversion
of ecologically valuable land into intensively
used areas, is still common and persistent, with woefully
inadequate regard for the ecological contexts
(eg networks of protected areas). The different planning
disciplines are often poorly coordinated with
each other and neglect the perspective of regionally
significant ecosystem services. One reason for this is
that the geographic areas under consideration are
often small, and either the multi-faceted functions of
ecosystem complexes have not yet become visible or
the causes for local events are beyond the local institutions’
sphere of influence and action. Even where
industrialized countries are taking these functions
into account – eg in managing protected forests in the
alpine area – other tourism or infrastructure plans
are frequently still being operated in parallel, completely
divorced from these ecosystem functions.The
land is in the possession of many different owners
with contradicting interests, which is reflected in the
highly divergent and conflicting demands being
made of the landscape and land use.
In both cases there is a lack of practical application
of the principle formulated at global level that
both conservation and sustainable use of biological
diversity must be integrated at local level. This raises
the question as to which approach might best be used