Future.Scapes

Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Culture

Global change encompasses multiple fields: climate-, economic-, social-, and land use change. Knowledge about local effects of global change is still scarce and afflicted with high uncertainty. It is a crucial challenge for political and civil stakeholders to develop strategies to anticipate and cope with globally induced changes.
Future.scapes will examine and downscale global change effects to local and regional level. The research will focus on those most pressing economic, societal and landscape transitions. It aims to support practitioners in recognising, understanding and managing change.
The research team applies a holistic systemic approach. Nature, society and economy are interacting systems. The complex local cause-effect relations require deep insights into local landscape systems to suggest sustainable structures. Different regions are affected by different global change issues, each requiring a pertinent strategy. To ensure an integrated view as well as local applicability following key topics for three landscape types will be examined:
• urban.scapes: structural, economic change in industrial urban regions
• agri.scapes: viability of family farms in rural regions
• mountain.scapes: climate change in an alpine tourist regions

In each reference region of these 3 landscape types a case study is selected: the industrial city of Steyr, the rural village of Gars am Kamp, and Silbertal (Montafon). There the effects of global change on local landscape and society will be investigated. Drivers of future transition will be explored through qualitative and quantitative scenario building together with practitioners and schools. The local results will then be transferred to larger areas:
• The central industrial region of Upper Austria (Steyr-Linz-Wels), the Lower Austrian hilly area, the alpine area of the Western Austrian Alps)
• All Austrian regions with either urban industrial, agricultural hilly or alpine tourism characteristics.