Policy Papers and Resolutions

This is IFLA Europe’s 2025 Consolidated Policy Brief, presenting the collective position of landscape architects on key European policies shaping landscapes today and in the future.

• The publication highlights the essential role of landscape architecture in addressing climate change, biodiversity loss, water security, soil health, public health, cultural heritage, agriculture, tourism, circular economy, and urban development.
• The paper is drawing on current EU strategies such as the European Green Deal, the European Landscape Convention, and the New European Bauhaus, the booklet demonstrates how landscape architects combine scientific, ecological, cultural, and design expertise to deliver resilient, equitable, and high-quality living environments.
• We call for stronger recognition of landscape architecture in policy-making and governance, and offers a practical policy toolkit to support public authorities, professionals, and stakeholders in implementing integrated, landscape-led solutions across Europe.

In this paper we:

• Present the relation of Landscape Architects to establish and promote biodiversity through their work.
• We describe the Landscape Architects´ vision and strategic steps to achieve a biodiverse planet.
• Provide recommendations to different environmental conditions and target groups, based on existing EU Policies regarding the biodiversity.

In this paper we:

• clarify and analyse the crucial role of Landscape Architects in implementing holistic circularety concepts and the technical, analytical and scientific skills sets to serve and implement the Circular Economy model in landscape projects.

• We present the importance of adapting the principles of Circular Economy in design and management of our landscapes.

• We reveal our ideas about how we as Landscape Architects could influence policy mechanisms for implementing Circular Economy at European and global level.

The paper promotes our positions in relation to the role of Landscape Architects in the Circulair Economy model.

Europe’s growing cities face environmental and social strain, especially on vulnerable communities, but offer an opportunity to regenerate urban life through landscape architecture, nature-based solutions, and community-led, integrated design.

Landscape architecture stands at the heart of this transformation. As a spatial discipline with ecological and cultural fluency, it is uniquely positioned to guide the regeneration of cities through nature-based solutions, community participation, and integrated systems thinking.

Landscape is naturally resilient; it has the capacity to adapt to survive.

Its resilience is represented mostly by individual plants, as well as complex plant communities, and their close association with climate, micro-climate, geology, landform, soils, and local biodiversity, even in urban and peri-urban environments.

The most effective and long-term measures to mitigate or even prevent climate crisis-induced disasters – such as drought, desertification, heavy precipitation, floods, landslides, and the urban heat island effect – are nature-based solutions (NBS), especially vegetation.

Our landscapes are changing rapidly, risking the loss of identity and heritage.

While green initiatives drive ecological progress, cultural values are often overlooked.

Careful, history-informed design is essential to balance development and preserve what makes places unique.

Statement of the Conference of the member States of the Council of Europe to the European Landscape Convention on the professional recognition of landscape architects.

Adopted at the 10th Council of Europe Conference on the European Landscape Convention, in Strasbourg on 7 May 2019.

and

Reference Report “Professional recognition of landscape architects”.

Prepared in the framework of the Work Programme of the Council of Europe for the implementation of the European Landscape Convention, by Michael Oldham, as Expert of the Council of Europe.