Consiglio per la ricerca in agricoltura e l'analisi dell'economia agraria, centro di ricerca per l'olivicoltura e l'industria olearia (CREA-OLI), via Nursina 2, 06049 Spoleto (PG), Italy,

The objective of this work is to determine the perception, in terms of sustainability, of stakeholders involved in an innovative process developed in a rural area. The innovative process focuses on the introduction of green technologies and low carbon emissions linked to the product and the process in the context of a circular economy model. The methodology is based on a variation of the MESMIS evaluation framework through which ex ante sustainability is analysed following the participatory process using focus group techniques. The results show that acceptance is conditional on obtaining positive economic results from farmers and wineries. The local scale of implementation of the project and the identification with technology based on the use of endogenous resources such as microalgae by the label of origin of the wine are factors that favoured the interest of the participatory process to address the sustainability of innovative technology.

No abstract

The EU Commission has established Green infrastructure as one of the tools to preserve biodiversity and grant the provision of ecosystem services that reduce impacts on natural values like those produced by climate change. Therefore, a European green infrastructure strategy has been created that commit member states to incorporate green infrastructure to their territorial planning. Yet, methodologies to delimit green infrastructure so as to facilitate its inclusion in territorial plans are still scarce. The available methods are mainly based in multicriteria evaluation and focus on zoning general green infrastructure areas taking into account the provision potential of just a few ecosystem services. Considering the provision of a wide range of ecosystem services to delimit green infrastructure elements is key to grant their multifunctionality and increase their efficiency mitigating climate change impacts in natural values and human population. However, the lack of data or the high cost to accurately map ecosystem services provision potential, leads most of the time to infer it from land cover data. This creates problems when using these maps to delimit green infrastructure in areas with fragmented landscapes; since identified green infrastructure areas may be irregular and scattered. There are heuristic methods like simulated annealing that have been used to identify ecosystem services hot spots which consider the regularity and size of the identified patches. These methods can be used to delimit green infrastructure in fragmented landscapes finding a balance between the regularity of the areas and their potential to provide multiple ecosystem services. In the current work, a comparison has been made between the performance of simulated annealing and current multicriteria evaluation methods to delimit green infrastructure multifunctional buffer zones in an area of north-western Spain with a very fragmented landscape. Results have shown that simulated annealing delimits more regular multifunctional buffer areas but with a less average potential for providing multiple ecosystem services. The conclusions of the paper indicate that simulated annealing is good produces more regular multifunctional areas but with a lower ESs provision potential. It was observed that in the case of ESs that were mapped considering factors at landscape scale, their provision potential did not vary too much between the multifunctional buffer areas delimited with each of the methods. This indicates that delineation methods may produce more regular GI elements if ESs provision potential is mapped considering the influence of biophysical factors at a wider landscape scale.