Misiūnė, Ieva

With growing urban populations and increasing demands for more liveable, healthy and resilient cities, green infrastructure (GI) emerged over the last decade as a strategy to improve the quality of life in urban areas, delivering ecological, socio-cultural and economic benefits. To reach the European Union’s political ambitions, it is vital that the concept and its content are used consistently and coherently from national to local scale. Regarding the content, the ambiguity of the multifunctionality characteristic of GI presents an opportunity for adaptation to local values, while also risking to remain a vague and abstract promise. A policy analysis was conducted in four European cities to investigate the uptake of the GI concept in policies relevant for urban green spaces and if it is in line with EU’s understanding. Additionally, we investigate through interviews how interactions between agencies contribute to the mainstreaming of the concept to the municipal level. We found variations in uptake level and interpretation, which can partly be explained by the competition of new and established concepts, and existing structures (legislation and routines of practice). Each case study made multifunctionality concrete by linking multiple values to it, although the amount of values and depth of consideration differs. We found interactions between policymakers themselves, as well with science and civil society, contributing to the mainstreaming of the concept.

The majority of Europeans live in cities, where parks as components of Urban Green Spaces (UGSs) play an important role in well-being and the provision of ecosystem services (ES). UGSs are especially relevant for the implementation of the United Nations (UN) Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals “Good health and wellbeing” (Goal 3) and “Sustainable cities and communities” (Goal 11). This study focused on ES use and users’ motives, which were surveyed during visits at central parks in the cities Leipzig, Coimbra and Vilnius. Park visitors used 17 different ES, dominated by physical interactions such as walking or biking, followed by experiential and aesthetical ES and ES linked to social relations. Age of visitors, cultural setting and distance to homes influenced ES use in the parks differently in each city, limiting the transferability of park-user behavior or motivations across different spatial and cultural contexts. Results also indicate that aligning sustainability objectives and usability, good accessibility of urban parks plays a central role and encourages the use of non-motorized or public transport for park visits. Concrete information about UGS user motivation and behaviour generated in this and similar studies contributes to convert the UN Agenda 2030 strategies at the municipal level into sustainability and user-oriented design and management of UGS.

With increasing urbanisation, urban green spaces are expected to be crucial for urban resilience and sustainability, through the delivery of ecological, economic and social benefits. In practice, however, planning, management and evaluation of urban green spaces are rarely structured and evidence-based. This represents a missed opportunity to account for, track and foster the multiple benefits that green spaces are expected to deliver. To gain insight into this gap, this study assesses the availability and uptake of relevant evidence by city governments. Interviews, focus groups and quantitative surveys were applied in four medium-sized European cities: Coimbra (Portugal), Genk (Belgium), Leipzig (Germany), and Vilnius (Lithuania), covering the main governance and climatic gradients in Europe. Using straightforward data exploration and regression, we analyse which ecological, economic and social indicators are typically chosen by cities and why. Together with the city stakeholders, we derived a common set of benefit categories and key performance indicators which can be adapted to diverse local contexts. We conclude that cities tend to make pragmatic decisions when composing their indicator sets, but nevertheless cover multiple urban green space dimensions. Finally, we explore how indicator choice could be optimised towards a complementary and credible indicator set, taking into account a realistically feasible monitoring effort undertaken by the cities.

During the last few decades, many environmental certification schemes were developed to enhance transparency and traceability within commodity chains. Most of them are transnational schemes, which means that they were created by non-governmental organizations and/or the private sector, independently from governments. This article aims to examine how local certified companies assess the functioning of such private environmental certification. It presents the results of an empirical research about the expectations and satisfaction of certified companies in Lithuania. Empirical data were collected through a survey with 90 companies certified by one of the three major transnational environmental standards: Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) for the forestry and logging, Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) for fishing and aquaculture, and Oeko-Tex for the production of textiles. The results revealed that most companies have adopted these standards quite recently, indicating that it is generally a new trend in Lithuania. The findings suggest that the overall expectations with the standards’ functions, such as sending signals to clients or getting more market share, were higher than the satisfaction in all cases. The main transnational environmental standard adoption motive was the client demand. It turned out, however, that later after the certification procedure the majority of the companies were most satisfied with the market opportunities that opened up. Furthermore, the companies expected certification to operate best as a market-based mechanism; but most satisfactory performance was accredited to the signalling mechanism. Research suggests that certification provides various benefits for the companies, but the expectations might be rather exaggerated.

Soil maps and models are indispensable tools in sustainable land management. The sustainable land use of our territory is fundamental to providing long-term socio-economic and environmental benefits. The risk of land degradation and corresponding declines in ecosystem services depends on the type of land use. Soil restoration can be extremely expensive, more than the implementation of sustainable land use practices. This is especially important in the context of climate change and the increasing pressure that a growing population places on soil resources, which is a global phenomenon. The objective of this chapter is to show the advantages of using soil mapping and modeling in sustainable land use planning and management. Soil mapping is fundamental to understand the distribution of soil properties, allowing us to implement sustainable practices in vulnerable areas and prevent land degradation. Soil indicators and models provide indispensable information for an accurate evaluation of land degradation status. Alone, or integrated with other disciplines, soil information is extremely important for understanding the causes of land degradation and implementation of sustainable land management. Accurate information and models are key tools for managers and decision makers to implement sustainable land use management policies.

This research presents a geographic information systems (GIS)-based method for ecosystem services (ES) potential assessment in a case study for the Lithuanian national territory. The ES potential was assessed for 31 CORINE land-cover classes (CLC2006) together with 31 ES categorized into regulating, provisioning and cultural ES. An expert-based ranking approach using a two-dimensional ES matrix and a geospatial analysis was applied to determine total ES potential, spatial patterns and relations among multiple ES. Results showed that forest areas had the highest potential for ES delivery whereas ES potential in urban areas was lowest. The spatial autocorrelation of regulating and cultural ES were dispersed while provi- sioning ES were significantly clustered. The principal component analysis (PCA) identified five factors with distinctive geospatial distribution: Factor 1 – forest areas, Factor 2 – aquatic environments, Factor 3 – livestock farming and energy production, Factor 4 – agricultural food production and Factor 5 – mineral extraction sites. The plotting of Factors 1 and 2 accounted for 72.81% of variance and identified three ES bundles composed by specific ES types: Bundle 1 – forest ecosystems, Bundle 2 – marine and freshwater ecosystems and Bundle 3 – mixed provisioning ecosystems. Trade-offs occur between regulating and cultural ES against the provisioning ES crop production and livestock farming. We conclude that the presented ES assessment can support decision-makers in the development of strategies for natural resources management at national and regional level, support the identification of trade-offs and synergies among ES types and foster ES research in Lithuania.

The objective of this paper is to examine the spatial distribution of several precipitation indexes in Sierra Nevada, Spain: mean annual number of wet days (R aeyen 1 mm), mean annual number of heavy rainy days (R aeyen 10 mm) and mean annual number of very heavy precipitation days (R aeyen 20 mm) and test the performance of several interpolation methods using these variables. In total, 17 univariate and multivariate methods were tested. A set of 36 metereological stations distributed in Sierra Nevada and neighbouring areas was analysed in this study. The original data did not followed the normal distribution; thus, a logarithm was applied to data meet normality purposes. Interpolator's performance was assessed using the root mean square error generated from cross-validation. The results showed that the mean annual R aeyen 10 mm and R aeyen 20 mm have a higher variability than R aeyen 1 mm. While the elevation and longitude did not show a significant correlation with the studied indexes, the latitude (i.e. distance to the sea) showed a significant negative correlation. The regressions carried out confirmed that elevation was the covariate with higher capacity to explain the variability of the indexes. The incorporation of elevation and longitude slightly increased the explanation capacity of the models. The data of LogR aeyen 1 mm, LogR aeyen 10 mm and LogR aeyen 20 mm displayed a clustered pattern, especially the last two indexes that also showed a strong spatial dependency attributed to the effects of local topography, slope, aspect and valley orientation. The best fitted variogram model to LogR aeyen 1 mm was the linear one while for the LogR aeyen 10 mm and LogR aeyen 20 mm, the Gaussian was the most appropriate. The best interpolator for LogR aeyen 1 mm was the local polinomyal with the power of 1, whereas for LogR aeyen 10 mm and LogR aeyen 20 mm, regression kriging (ROK) using as auxiliary variables the elevation, latitude and longitude was the most accurate. ROK methods significantly improved the interpolations accuracy, especially in LogR aeyen 10 mm and LogR aeyen 20 mm. Nevertheless, the covariates, when used as auxiliary information in ordinary kriging, did not improve the precision of the interpolation.