Symposium on Multispecies cultural niche construction for biodiversity recovery
Forum Marinum, Turku
Protected areas alone are not enough to halt biodiversity loss and enable its recovery. We also need to protect biodiversity on private and public lands used for economic purposes as current sectoral laws have not adequately addressed these needs. The European Union’s Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 and the Law on Nature Restoration are ambitious, but significant efforts to restore biodiversity will depend on strategic policymaking, collaboration, and voluntary actions. Therefore, strategic land use planning and nature-based solutions adopted on various scales will become crucial for protecting biodiversity on these lands.
Our symposium will explore how to make strategic land use planning effective and equitable for biodiversity recovery. We will draw on concepts from biological and cultural niche construction to view land use planning as a form of niche construction, involving property owners, stakeholders, planners, decision-makers, residents, and nonhumans as niche constructors. By thinking of social practices as niche constructive, we will reflect on how strategic land use planning can enhance biodiversity within existing sectorial laws and policies, and how it can promote plan designs and orders for multispecies cultural niche construction and interspecies democracy.
We welcome contributions on:
• ways of overcoming trade-offs between productive activities and biodiversity recovery,
• theoretical insights on biological and cultural niche construction,
• empirical aspects of strategic land use planning & biodiversity targets,
• critiques of strategic nature conservation.
Guest speakers:
- Senior Lecturer Panu Halme (ecologist and evolutionary biologist, University of Jyväskylä),
- Professor Carsten Herrmann-Pillath (evolutionary economist, University of Erfurt, Germany), and
- Postdoctoral Researcher Roope Kaaronen (multidisciplinary human scientist, University of Helsinki).
If interested, please send a short bio and an abstract (max 150 words) outlining your perspective on strategic niche construction for biodiversity recovery to Juha Hiedanpää and Niina Malinen at luke.fi.
Deadline: 28 February, 2025.
Cover photo: Ram Kishor on Unsplash