Uncertainty and Multifunctionality: Legal Challenges and Opportunities for Green Infrastructure (GI)

Abstract

Nature and its vital contributions to people, which together embody biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services , are deteriorating from the changes in land and sea use, overexploitation of animals, plants and other organisms, pollution and climate change. The anthropogenic changes in ecological systems have been so profound that scientists even warn that we have now entered a new geological period-"аnthropocene". As we continue degrading our natural environment in order to gain ecological, economic and social benefits, the utilization of "nature-based solutions (NBS)" remains an underutilized option. "Green Infrastructure" (GI) concept and the implementation of GI emerges as a policy response to address and reverse the current rather counterproductive practice. The European Commission defines GI as a "strategically planned network of natural and semi-natural areas with other environmental features, designed and managed to deliver a wide range of ecosystem services ...". Yet, designing and implementing GI policy has proved challenging: e.g. how to safeguard sound and effective decision-making in managing complex systems with multiple stakeholders at various temporal/spatial scales, under conditions of uncertainty, with multiple conflicting interests? These and other questions in relation to GI design and implementation were discussed in April, 2020 during the "Woodnet" project (co-funded by the European Commission through Biodiversa) international interdisciplinary webinar "Uncertainty and Multifunctionality: Legal Challenges and Opportunities for GI" (administered by the Catholic University of Louvain (UCLouvain), Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium). In the advent of a collective handbook and an international conference on the legal issues of GI design and implementation to be held in 2021, the present article contributes to the ongoing discussions on uncertainty and multifunctionality and the associated legal challenges and opportunities in the context of GI design and implementation by discussing the relevant questions, raised during the recent webinar.