Cultural Landscape Approaches and Climate Change Policy

Dear Colleagues,

Cultural landscapes are the result of interactions between human beings and natural resources, according to the European Landscape Convention. Climate change will increasingly affect these landscapes and cultural heritage resources due to increases in the frequency of extreme weather events and droughts, as well as in temperature and other impacts. Climate change impacts affect different landscapes differently; hence, adaptation strategies, by their nature, need to be locally specific and driven by local conditions, vulnerabilities, and needs. The European Landscape Convention focuses on the social and cultural values of the landscape that make a community unique. Local economies are linked to natural and cultural resources through traditional economies, based on agriculture, forestry and land use, water use, and tourism along short supply and value chains. Thus, policy makers and landscape planners need to consider a holistic approach (or landscape approach) to foster sustainable management transition that accounts for these interactions in order to develop effective adaptation and mitigation strategies for climate change.

This Special Issue aims to review discourses and frameworks and contribute to the state-of-the-art knowledge of the relationships between climate change, cultural landscapes, and local sustainable adaptation. It will provide background pieces on options, empirical investigation of potential local climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies, and discuss opportunities and challenges in facilitating new approaches to climate change adaptation that incorporate cultural landscapes. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Reviews of existing indicators, methods, and tools for the assessment of climate change impacts on cultural landscapes and cultural heritage resources;
• Analyses of the cultural landscape approach and integrated landscape approach to climate change;
• Reviews focused on the challenges and opportunities of integrating climate change mitigation and adaptation policies with cultural landscapes;
• Methods of improving adaptive capacities of local institutions;
• Protecting cultural landscapes using climate-smart agriculture, agroforestry or agroecology approaches.

Dr. Allison M. Chatrchyan
Dr. Ahmadreza Shirvani Dastgerdi
Prof. Dr. María Rosa Mosquera-Losada
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• Cultural landscapes
• Traditional cultures
• Cultural heritage resources
• Integrated landscape management
• Climate change adaptation
• Climate-smart agriculture
• Agroforestry approaches
• Agroecology approaches
• Governance of cultural landscapes
• Landscape policies