Even popularly thought, landscapes are much more than visual sceneries. Instead, they are environments for dialog between nature and culture. The 2004 European Landscape Convention (ELC) is the first international treaty to be exclusively concerned with the protection, management and planning of all dimensions of landscape, and not restricted to exceptional landscapes but also considering everyday landscapes.The Landscape Approach (LA) is a bottom-up, collaborative and community-based approach to landscape planning and management, with the aim of balancing competing demands in a way that is best for human well-being and the environment. It means creating solutions that consider food and livelihoods, finance, rights, restoration and progress towards climate and development goals. LA opens opportunities to discuss and negotiate from the more concrete shared reality, with the outline of values, expectations and acceptable trade-offs for each type of user and stakeholder, in order to envision future landscapes upon the principle of non-regressive policies of the ELC.Living and thriving landscapes are increasingly related to wellbeing and quality of life, and the public administration cannot manage them with traditional sectoral thinking. Hence, many private corporations, NGOs, landowners and citizens, are developing or getting involved in experiences to regenerate or manage landscapes in environmentally friendly ways. It is a novel trend by which communities and stakeholders are gaining ownership over the spaces that conform the green and blue infrastructures of ordinary surroundings, but also a solution for endangered or highly valuable and very sensitive natural areas at international scale.Even if the ELC has affected the national landscape legislation, the basic ideas of the LA are seldom implemented in landscape practices. As a consequence, landscape remains prone to social conflicts, as landscapes’ multifaceted nature and multistakeholder legitimacy are insufficiently considered.The partners of the consortium are willing to tackle the question, how actors and stakeholders can collaborate into the governance of a landscape. Thus, the main aim of the project is to enhance landscape awareness and collaborative governance of cultural and natural landscapes through innovative learning interventions in higher education. The specific objectives of the project are:- To promote integrated landscape approach in land use and environmental management.- To enhance civic engagement to bring-on pro-environmental behavior towards every day landscapes and threatened landscapes.- To innovate in citizen science and participatory methods as tools for landscape planning and management.- To design innovative learning environments and interventions for landscape education in order to ensure collaboration and knowledge creation.The project activities will culminate in Learning Labs organized in the partner countries. In the Labs, HE students will be offered a close-up experience about community-based landscape planning, management, and conservation initiatives with stakeholders, like local authorities, environmentalist NGOs as well as local citizens. While working on concrete situations of action students are guided to collaborative knowledge creation together with stakeholders and generating new knowledge, skills and innovations.In addition to the main target group of HE students and teachers, the project recognizes other target groups, like policy-makers, local and regional authorities, environmental planners and managers, environmental NGOs and citizens.Expected results of the project have been foreseen into societal, scientific and educational results:Societal results:- Exploitation of integrated LA through interactive applications and participatory methods ease off the deployment of collaborative landscape governance- Awareness of landscape values increases and citizens are more engaged to act for their local landscapes- New knowledge and improved flow of communication between policy-makers, authorities and citizens- Citizen science application is an open-access tool for every interested userScientific results:- Contribution to the theoretical discussion of the holistic nature of landscape- The rise of the methodological awareness when studying landscape - Elaboration of the connection between the LA and the citizen science- Emphasis towards the idea of open scienceEducational results:- New transferable HE landscape education methodologies, applications and materials - Enhanced skills and competences of the students and teachers involved in the project activities- New pedagogical innovations based to the socio-constructivist learning theory- Increased ability of involved students to comprehend and act on the multifaceted processes of landscape governance- Innovative learning environments and interventions play significant role in landscape education

"ON THE WAY TOWARDS A LOW-CARBON SOCIETY - Increasing professionalism in land use and landscape management within climate changeThe European Commission is looking for cost-efficient ways to make the European economy more climate-friendly and less energy-consuming. By 2050, the European Union could cut most of its greenhouse gas emissions. In this framework, the idea of a low-carbon society has been launched as an aim of future societies. According future scenarios and national strategies, a large number of environmental specialists are and will be needed for preventing climate change and achieving the aims of a low-carbon society.Nowadays, the problem is that the higher education sector does not have a direct relationship to working life which would be the best party concerned to mentor and direct educational structures in the field of environmental issues. Close cooperation between working life and education as well as working life based issues as threads of study structures would be a way to train environmental specialists able to respond to challenges of land use and landscape issues and, broadly, to challenges of a low-carbon society. The overall aim of the project is to create and empower higher education structures, which will achieve professionalism in the management of land use and landscape issues targeting the idea of a low-carbon society and, hence, preventing climate change.TowardsLCS is a consortium of nine partners from Finland, Poland and Spain including three academic institutions and six local, regional or national organizations (working life partners):FINLAND1. University of Eastern Finland2. Metsähallitus, the Parks & Wildlife Finland (national public body)3. Regional Council of North Karelia (regional public body)POLAND4. Adam Mickiewicz University5. Miejska Pracownia Urbanistyczna (Municipal Planning Office) (local public body)6. Zakład Zagospodarowania Odpadów (Waste Management Company) (enterprise)SPAIN7. University of Girona8. Landscape Observatory (consortium, advisory body)9. Girona Provincial Council (local public body)The project has highlighted environmental questions, which are real and present in land use and landscape planning and management at the local, regional and national levels. The project has empowered the local, regional and international cooperation between the university and working life partners and it has opened opportunities for further cooperation on the fields of higher education, regional development and research.The most important achievement of the project is the ""Towards Low-Carbon Societies Learning Platform and Study Modules"", see: http://towardslowcarbon.eu/. The platform is an open-access study area for the higher education and anybody who is interested about the idea of low-carbon society. It 1) offers information about low-carbon society 2) helps to design a low-carbon theme course in higher education and 3) in the frames of flipped learning, includes study materials before intensive course activities."

The overarching objective of RUSTIK is to enable rural communities’ actors and policy makers to design better strategies, initiatives and policies fostering sustainability transitions of rural areas, through an advanced understanding of different rural functionalities, characteristics and future scenarios of rural areas, their potentials and challenges. Central specific objectives are to provide (1) a robust methodological framework for functional rural areas, (2) databases integrating data of different types and sources, (3), improved strategies and governance approaches for rural decision makers and stakeholders, and (4) improved approaches for rural impact assessment and decentralised rural proofing. RUSTIK aims to substantially contribute to enhancing existing European policy tools and approaches, most of all to support the European Green Deal, the European Digital Strategy, the European pillar of Social Rights and the EU Long-Term Vision for Rural Areas of the European Union. RUSTIK addresses the topic by illuminating three key transitions in rural areas, i.e. (1) socio-economic, (2) climate change and environmental, and (3) digital. Five types of rural functions are RUSTIK’s starting point for characterising the diversity of rural areas and their capacity to respond to these transitions. In order to achieve its overarching and specific objectives, RUSTIK will (1) create a conceptual basis for functional rural areas, transition and resilience of rural areas building on previous research, (2) co-design data collection approaches, and (3) investigate policy frameworks and coordination mechanisms. Closely interrelated with all of these activities, Living Labs in 14 European Pilot Regions in 10 European countries will be the central element of an action-oriented multi-actor approach to researching rural diversity and societal transformations.