Evaluating Today's Landscape Multifunctionality and Providing an Alternative Future: A Normative Scenario Approach

Intensive agriculture has had multiple negative effects on the environment across large areas of Europe, including a decrease in the degree to which these landscapes serve multiple functions. A quantitative evaluation of the deficits in landscape multifunctionality is difficult, however, for a given landscape as long as "multifunctional reference landscapes" are lacking. We present an interdisciplinary normative scenario approach to overcome this obstacle. Given the example of the lower Wetter-catchment in the Wetterau region (Hesse, Germany), we compare the existing landscape with an expert-generated multifunctional landscape scenario that may also serve as an alternative future. This approach may inspire policy makers and land users by providing a methodology for the design of alternative multifunctional futures in five steps: (1) documentation of today's landscape structure and land use at the scale of uniformly managed land units; (2) detection of functional deficits of today's landscape considering environmental (soil contamination, groundwater production, water quality, biodiversity), economic (land rent), and societal (landscape perception by its population) attributes; (3) compilation of a catalogue of alternative land uses (including linear landscape elements) suitable to minimize the detected functional deficits; (4) rule-based modification of today's land-use pattern into a normative scenario; and (5) comparison of today's landscape and the normative scenario by applying the model network (ITEM)-M-2. Results highlight a strongly unbalanced allocation of private and public goods in today's landscape with severe deficits in environmental and societal landscape features, but a significantly higher land rent. The designed multifunctional scenario, instead, may be preferred by the local population, and their willingness to pay for multifunctionality could potentially compensate calculated opportunity costs. Hence, the generated landscape scenario may be regarded as an alternative, multifunctional future.