Home

Centre for Sustainable Area Management (CeSAM)

Main content

CeSAM logo

The Centre for Sustainable Area Management (CeSAM) is a UiB initiative to support sustainable management of our landscapes and oceans, biodiversity, and nature's benefits to people.
We focus on evidence-based decision making and consolidating cross-disciplinary research and education.

The climate crisis and simultaneous dramatic loss of biodiversity and natural resources present the greatest challenge humanity has faced.

As the human environmental footprint and our appropriation of the earth's resources exceed sustainable limits, yet continue to grow, we need to rethink our view on, and interactions with nature. We must acknowledge that land, area itself, is a basic and limited resource.

At the same time, we must acknowledge and embrace the fact that we cannot separate or isolate nature from people. Nature and people coexist in both natural and human-dominated landscapes, and we must govern the land so as to optimise this coexsistence of biodiversity, and ecosystems, and people.

This requires that we develop multifunctional landscapes, rather than optimising landscapes for a single function or use. Competing land uses will create increasing conflict in years to come.

CeSAM works toward generating and providing knowledge of which trade-offs and synergies exist, and how these can be handled legally, socially and ecologically to the benefit of nature and people. 

The Biosphere Day
Group of people watching a woman presenting something on a screen.

First Biosphere Day in Nordhordland UNESCO BR

On June 1st Nordhordland UNESCO Biosphere Reserve arranged their first ever Biosphere Day together with the UNESCO Chair Group at UiB. There was a programme from noon to evening, full of content about ongoing and concluded research in the area, in addition to interesting themes on sustainability...

PhD Defence
Jarrod Cusens

Mapping the Connections

PhD candidate Jarrod Cusens, connected to the UNESCO Chair and CESAM, is defending his thesis "Mapping the Connections" on Monday April 24.

SDG CONFERENCE 2023
SDG conference logo

Day Zero: Pathways to participatory research and knowledge co-production: notes from the ‘field’

Join members of the UNESCO Chair Group and the Centre for Sustainable Area Management (CeSAM) for a workshop on participatory research during Day Zero, February 8th 2023.

COP15
Kunming-Montreal deal summary

Cheat sheet to the Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework

In December 2022, two years after it was planned, 196 nations signed on to the historic Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM-GBF).

News
areal view of the amazin

Human impacts outpace natural processes in the Amazon

A new review in Science reveals the quick and accumulating impacts of humans in the Amazon – and nature will likely not be able to keep up....

Traditional and modern land use - here from the 1970s in south-western Norway