Riccardo Simoncini

HECUA (Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs), 2233 University Avenue West, Suite 210, Saint Paul, MN 55114, USA · Italy study abroad program

Recent global and regional assessments of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) show that Nature’s Contributions to People (NCP) are under an alarming threat due to the continuing loss of biodiversity. These assessments call for increasing conservation efforts and a more sustainable use of biod...

The European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), being one of the strongest drivers of agricultural landuse practices, has a substantial impact on biodiversity and ecosystem services in the Member States. The initial focus of the CAP to increase and intensify agricultural production affected water and land qualities and contributed to the deg...

There is increasing recognition that agricultural landscapes meet multiple societal needs and demandsbeyond provision of economic and environmental goods and services. Accordingly, there have been sig-nificant calls for the inclusion of societal, amenity and cultural values in agri-environmental landscapeindicators to assist policy makers in monito...

This paper analyses the contribution of Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) to the conservation of agro-biodiversity. After reviewing the literature to identify existing approaches and methodologies to assess the environmental impacts of AFNs, the need to introduce territorial and historical contexts and critical thresholds to specifically analyse AFN...

Measuring societal awareness of the rural agrarian landscape Indicators and scale issues The work presented in this report is part of the effort to define the landscape state and diversity indicator in the frame of COM (2006) 508 “Development of agri-environmental indicators for monitoring the integration of environmental concerns into the common...

Conservation scientists, national governments, and international conservation groups seek to devise, and implement, governance strategies that mitigate human impact on the environment. However, few studies to date have systematically investigated the performance of different systems of governance in achieving successful conservation outcomes. Here,...

The complex relationships between governance processes, ecosystem management and biodiversity conservation are receiving growing attention by the scientific community. The scope of research in this field is generally that of identifying main governance factors leading to success or failure in the sustainable management of ecosystems and biodiversit...

It is widely acknowledged that the implementation of the majority of agri-environmental measures (AEMs) does not allow for the quantification of expected environmental benefits, thereby undermining the possibilities to assess both their effectiveness and efficiency. The objective of this paper is to show how an approach to develop agri-environmenta...

The overall objective of the AEMBAC project was to define a common European analytical framework on which to develop local agri-environmental programmes.

The agricultural use of natural resources in Europe is very diverse. It is therefore rather risky to make too many generalisations in describing European agriculture. Nevertheless there is an advantage in focusing on essentials when analysing current trends towards sustainability in agricultural land use. A common characteristic of European agricul...