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.
