Climate conditions, the state of nature, and human wellbeing are interconnected, and continuously changing. In COMBINED, we will combine climate, nature, and human interactions in landscapes including and combining grasslands, forests and urban nature. 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 steering and supporting their management and design, but is still lacking.
In COMBINED we will 1) unravel how changes in biodiversity and climate interact in Dutch landscapes, 2) evaluate the effects of existing measures and strategies on biodiversity recovery, climate mitigation and adaptation, ecosystem services, and 3) 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 is well-positioned to carry out this urgent and innovative project with the following envisioned breakthroughs: 1) 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, 2) 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 3) 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.
