Connecting the Dots: Midway Reflections and New Directions in LAND4CLIMATE
Joined-up thinking
As LAND4CLIMATE reached its midpoint, the project entered an important “connecting the dots” phase. Over the past months, every partner - Front-Running Regions (FRR), academic institutions and intermediaries - has made significant progress by further engaging with landowners and communities, modelling climate risks, and exploring governance pathways. Now, the moment has come to weave these threads together and embrace genuine joined-up thinking across various research activities and implementation phases.
Mid-project integration is not simply an administrative milestone; it is an analytical opportunity. By aligning insights across technical modelling, governance research, land management practices, and local engagement activities, a more holistic understanding of how Nature-based solutions (NbS) implementation and maintenance unfold in practice is formed. The early evidence is clear: acceptance does not stem from any single activity or stakeholder group. It emerges from the interplay between science, governance, local values, economic realities, perceptions and understanding of risk, and social capital and trust.
The coming months offer a chance to strengthen these connections - identifying synergies, avoiding duplication, and ensuring that each research strand contributes to a coherent, mutually reinforcing picture.
Update on NbS Acceptance Research: Focusing on Landowners
Alongside this broader integration, DEN Institute’s work on NbS acceptance is entering a more targeted phase. Building on earlier insights from the FRRs, interviews, and partner feedback, the focus is now on landowner acceptance of NbS. Landowners are key decision-makers in land management and climate adaptation, and their perspectives - values, risks, constraints, and motivations - influence what is feasible on the ground. At this stage, our research team is working on a framework to map survey questions against dimensions, sub-dimensions and measurable variables linked to acceptance. These main dimensions include awareness, perceptions, attitudes and values, social capital and trust, governance and behaviour. The challenge is striking the right balance: designing a survey that is deep enough to generate meaningful insights, yet flexible and applicable across all six regions.
Across Austria, Czechia, Germany, Italy, Romania, and Slovakia, landowners operate within different socio-economic conditions, land-use traditions, and policy environments. This diversity means that the survey needs to be both rigorously grounded and practical to implement. DEN Institute will aim to avoid superficiality and go beyond generic attitude measures, offering a sharp, evidence-based window into landowner NbS acceptance. At the same time, the survey must remain brief, user-friendly, and to the point, ensuring high participation and genuine engagement. The next steps involve testing questionnaire flow, refining wording with local partners for translation, and ensuring that the final instrument captures not only what landowners think—but why.
This article was written from LAND4CLIMATE consortium partner DEN Institute
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