Ecosystem Services as a Framework for Transformation of the Rhenish Mining Area

This book chapter discusses the concept of ecosystem services as a potential framework for socio-ecological transformation processes in mining areas toward resilient and sustainable post-mining landscapes. As mining landscapes all around the world are undergoing enormous transformation processes, finding the best balance between economic interests, social implications, and ecological and climate services is of utmost importance. Those mining landscapes provide indispensable regulating, provisioning, and cultural services while preserving or fostering stable ecosystems with high and regional typical biodiversity. Despite their crucial contributions to human well-being, the services in these landscapes are only rarely considered in spatial and landscape planning decisions. With accelerated global changes, those ecosystem services, however, become increasingly important. Thus, the authors propose the concept of ecosystem services and inclusion of biodiversity and discuss mechanisms of qualitative and quantitative evaluation, budgeting, and pathways for decision making. For this purpose, a first basic qualitative assessment of ecosystem service potentials for the transformation of the landscape of the Rhenish Mining Area was performed exemplarily.