The municipality of Köniz has committed to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2045 and offsetting unavoidable residual emissions locally. Climate-adapted land use can play a key role in reaching this target, as sustainable practices act as carbon sinks and preserve soil productivity while mitigating the effects of heat, drought, and heavy rainfall.
However, Köniz – a municipality located just outside the Swiss capital, Bern – currently lacks key elements for effective implementation, such as a systematic foundation for locally impactful solutions, participatory processes involving land users, and institutionalized pathways to scale best practices.
Land use for climate adaptation and net-zero emissions
This is where the “Climate Landscape Köniz” project comes in. Together with land users and local government, it seeks answers – both in practice and in policy – to the following questions:
- Which land use practices in Köniz simultaneously enhance climate adaptation and carbon sequestration – and what conflicting objectives must be considered?
- How should participatory processes be designed to ensure adoption of sustainable practices among land users?
- What mechanisms can be used to integrate proven land use practices into municipal policy and establish them as measures eligible for carbon offsetting?
The aim is to equip Köniz with land use practices that have been tested through participatory processes and to create a basis for quantifying their carbon sink effect for offsetting purposes within local climate regulations. The resulting findings will also benefit other periurban municipalities in Switzerland.
Project activities
Stakeholders from agriculture, forestry, watercourse maintenance, and local government are collaborating with researchers from CDE and the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) in a three-phase real-world experiment to:
- develop a shared vision for the future of the municipality’s landscape, based on the landscape scenarios of the WSL KLANG project, and select suitable land use practices to maintain landscape productivity, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and adapt to climate change (Phase I);
- to implement these practices on demonstration plots, gather feedback from land users, and assess their climate impact using the Carbon Benefits Project tools (Phase II); and
- to document the results in the WOCAT Global Sustainable Land Management Database, identify ways to scale up the practices, and embed them in the local spatial planning strategy (Phase III).
The role of science
CDE and WSL researchers are designing and facilitating the participatory process, laying the scientific groundwork, and supporting implementation on the demonstration sites. In addition to assessing the impact of the practices on climate adaptation and greenhouse gas sequestration, they are investigating the factors that encourage land users to adopt new practices.
