Exploring Climate Change Impacts on Mental Well-being: new project WellAdapt examines consequences on climate adaptation decisions in agriculture
From 29 February to 4 April 2016, nine students worked on the question of how payments for ecosystem services can be used for the development of the Szczecin Lagoon. The Szczecin Lagoon is home to a habitat diversity that hardly exists any more in Central Europe. The most diverse habitats meet here: beech forests on steep coasts, huge river deltas, riparian forests, extensive moors and dry heath landscapes. Large forests with lakes line the water areas of the Haff. In cooperation with the Deutsche Umwelthilfe (German Environmental Aid), actors on both the German and Polish sides are engaged in the area to test and apply new ways of financing nature conservation in order to develop and preserve this landscape. Among other things, the Szczecin Lagoon is a selected area of a Europe-wide initiative called "Rewilding Europe" (www.rewildingeurope.com), which aims to develop wilderness areas in Europe. For this purpose, the initiative wants to develop new ways of financing in cooperation with local actors, especially through targeted marketing of these areas via nature tourism.
In the practical seminar, the students investigated the motives and interests of various relevant local actors in order to develop possible approaches for the targeted remuneration of ecosystem services and biodiversity in the area and to discuss these with local actors at the end of the seminar. The practical seminar was accompanied by Prof. Dr. Bettina Matzdorf and Achim Schäfer (Ernst Moritz Arndt University Greifswald).
