Facts

Contact person:
Anders Melin
Financer:
  • Formas
Responsible at MaU:
Anders Melin
Time frame:
01 January 2022 - 31 December 2024
Faculty/department:
Research environment :
Research subject:

Project description

In this project, we will survey how four Swedish municipalities -Gothenburg, Malmö, Stockholm and Umeå- seek to combine biodiversity preservation with urban development. All four municipalities have either explicit plans for urban biodiversity or have included biodiversity preservation in their comprehensive plans. Through interviews with municipal planners and overviews of central relevant documents, the 3-year project will explicate and identify goals and value conflicts in urban biodiversity planning. By drawing on theories of urban development and applied ethics, the goals and value conflicts will be analyzed and reasoned about in a structured manner.

In addition to the scholarly aim of identifying value conflicts at the point where biodiversity and urban development meet, a central aim is to establish guidelines and a guidebook to facilitate municipal urban biodiversity planning. The guidelines will be developed during the last year of the project and will be tested through workshops in each of the four municipalities to assess the extent to which the guidelines facilitate urban biodiversity planning, and to inform the research project on how the guidelines can be improved.

Activities within the project

In the autumn of 2022, we interviewed officials from Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmö and Umeå. Results from the interviews are published in two articles by Benedict Singleton (now employed at the University of Gothenburg) who worked on the project during 20220901-20240229, see below.

In spring 2023, we conducted workshops with representatives from the four municipalities to get feedback on a draft popular science report on managing value conflicts in urban biodiversity conservation. Based on the feedback from the workshops, we have published a final version of the report, written by Anders Melin (in Swedish, see below).

Publications

Report: Värden och värdekonflikter vid bevarandet av urban biologisk mångfald: Etiska perspektiv