George Iordachescu, a researcher at WUR's Forest and Nature Policy group, will receive a starting grant from the European Research Council. Together with three postdocs and a research assistant, he will research how the strict protection of biodiversity in Europe's marginal areas affect the human-environment relations. His research combines approaches from anthropology, history and politics.
The EU is earmarking 10% of Europe's land area for wilderness or strict nature protection by 2030. In this way, the EU wants to give substance to its climate and biodiversity policy. Iordachescu will research if and how uneven power relations within the EU's nature conservation policy underlie this vision. This vision of the EU raises serious issues of social and environmental injustice. The inhabitants of marginal areas in Europe may encounter loss of jobs and forced displacement and a decline in traditional ecological knowledge.
His project will investigate how strict protection of nature reshapes socio-environmental relations in four regions that are often overlooked in academic debates. These are the Southern Carpathians in Romania, the Central Apennines in Italy, the Central Cantabrians in Spain, and the Bieszczady in Southeast Poland. The project explores new analytical frameworks to understand the European conservation frontiers arising from the history of land use in these areas and current political relations in Europe. Iordachescu focuses on the question of how the EU's green growth vision produces non-intervention zones of strictly protected biodiversity-rich and carbon-rich areas.
Iordachescu: 'The project involves long periods of ethnographic fieldwork in four mountain areas of Europe that are extremely vulnerable to climate change and host high levels of biodiversity - which makes them zones of intervention for increased nature protection. My team will also organise a series of local workshops in the four locations to discuss alternatives to mainstream conservation. And we will also have a couple of knowledge exchange events in Brussels with policy makers.'
