Bringing the sharing-sparing debate down to the ground: Lessons learnt for participatory scenario development

The concepts of Land Sharing (LSH) and Land Sparing (LSP) shall help to manage trade-offs between land use and biodiversity conservation but applications in real world contexts are scarce. We review the literature on scenario and stakeholder processes and present a participatory approach to translate the LSH/LSP concept into practice. It is based on a scenario definition process harmonized across five case studies in Europe and resulted in semi-quantitative participative LSH and LSP scenarios. Harmonization eases comparability among case studies despite fundamentally different scenarios due to heterogeneous conditions across the regions. A key challenge was the right level of standardization for the scenario process to reach a common understanding across case study regions while acknowledging regional peculiarities. The resulting scenarios support for regional specific planning recommendations and can be input to quantitative ecosystem service and biodiversity models.