The European Landscape Convention, often called the Florence Convention after the city where it was adopted in 2000, is the first international treaty devoted entirely to the protection, management, and planning of landscapes across an entire continent. It entered into force in 2004 and has since been ratified by 39 Council of Europe member states, from Norway to Turkey to Azerbaijan.14D TájépÃtészeti és Kertművészeti Folyóirat. The European Landscape Convention of the Council of Europe and the Landscape Award of the Council of Europe The treaty sounds abstract on paper, but it reaches into land-use law, urban planning, agricultural policy, and energy infrastructure in ways that shape how millions of people experience their surroundings.
What the Convention Defines as “Landscape”
Most people hear the word “landscape” and picture a dramatic mountain range or a rolling vineyard. The Convention deliberately uses a broader definition. Under the ELC, a landscape is any area whose character results from the action and interaction of natural and human factors. That includes city centers, suburban sprawl, industrial zones, degraded land, farmland, coastline, and wilderness in equal measure. The treaty does not rank beautiful landscapes above ordinary or damaged ones. Every landscape counts because people live in all of them, and the quality of those landscapes directly affects daily life.
This inclusive definition was a conscious break from older conservation thinking, which tended to focus on exceptional or pristine places. By covering “everyday” landscapes, the Convention placed the peri-urban fringe around a growing city on the same policy footing as a national park. The practical effect is that signatory countries cannot simply protect a handful of scenic areas and call the job done. They are expected to assess, plan for, and manage the full range of landscapes within their borders.
The Three Pillars and Landscape Quality Objectives
The Convention organizes its obligations around three activities: protection, management, and planning. Protection covers the conservation and maintenance of significant features in a landscape. Management addresses ongoing upkeep and stewardship in ways that respect both ecological processes and social uses. Planning is forward-looking and involves creating or restoring landscapes, especially in areas undergoing rapid change such as urban edges or post-industrial zones.
Tying these three pillars together is the concept of Landscape Quality Objectives. Each signatory is expected to formulate these objectives for identified landscapes, spelling out what qualities the public and authorities want to maintain, enhance, or create. Researchers have developed structured methods for doing this, typically combining geographic analysis and classification of landscape units with social surveys and expert judgment to arrive at a set of indicators that capture what people value about a place.2PubMed. A new approach to the identification of Landscape Quality Objectives (LQOs) as a set of indicators The idea is to get beyond vague declarations like “keep this area green” and toward measurable, defensible targets. A quality objective might specify the maintenance of open sightlines in a river valley, the preservation of a traditional field pattern, or the integration of green corridors into a new housing development.
Getting from abstract objectives to practical outcomes is the hard part. Landscape quality objectives are only as powerful as the planning instruments that enforce them, and those instruments differ wildly from country to country.
Why Public Participation Is Central
One of the Convention’s strongest commitments is that the public should have a genuine say in how landscapes are identified, assessed, and managed. This is not a perfunctory nod toward democracy. The treaty text builds public participation into every stage: defining what counts as a valued landscape, setting quality objectives, and choosing the policies that follow.
Researchers studying how Norway implemented the ELC examined five different planning processes and evaluated the participation methods used against criteria such as scope, representativeness, timing, comfort for participants, and the actual influence that public input had on outcomes.3Land Use Policy. Public participation in landscape planning: Effective methods for implementing the European Landscape Convention in Norway The findings showed that meeting all those criteria simultaneously is difficult. A participation exercise might reach many people but fail to capture underrepresented groups, or it might engage a well-chosen panel but hold meetings at times and places that discourage attendance. Getting participation right requires resources, flexibility, and a willingness to adapt methods to local context.
The emphasis on participation also reflects a philosophical stance. Because the Convention defines landscape through people’s perception of their environment, locals are not simply stakeholders to be consulted; they are the ones whose experience gives a landscape its meaning. A terraced hillside in southern France is a cultural landscape because generations of farmers and residents shaped it and identify with it. Ignoring their perspective would undermine the Convention’s own logic.
How Implementation Varies Across Countries
Ratifying the Convention is one step; weaving it into national law and daily planning practice is another. A comparative study of six European countries found that actual implementation depends heavily on existing government systems and planning traditions.4Landscape and Urban Planning. Impacts of the European Landscape Convention on national planning systems: A comparative investigation of six case studies Catalonia, France, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom all ratified or engaged with the ELC, but they did so through different institutional pathways, with different degrees of ambition and different results.
Two broad conclusions emerged from the comparison. First, land management turns out to be one of the most powerful instruments for putting landscape policies into effect. Where authorities control how land is used at a fine-grained level, landscape considerations can be embedded in everyday decisions about zoning, agricultural subsidies, and infrastructure permitting. Second, landscape concerns tend to gain more traction when they are integrated into other policy sectors. Environmental regulation, cultural heritage protection, water management, infrastructure planning, and tourism policy all touch on landscape, and in many countries the sensitivity to landscape issues is greater inside those sectors than in any standalone landscape policy.5Landscape and Urban Planning. Impacts of the European Landscape Convention on national planning systems: A comparative investigation of six case studies
This cross-sector penetration is both a strength and a weakness. When landscape thinking permeates transport planning or agricultural policy, it can influence big decisions before they are locked in. But when it exists only as a borrowed concern inside other departments, it can be the first thing dropped when budgets tighten or priorities shift. Countries with a dedicated legal framework for landscape have an easier time maintaining consistency than those relying on goodwill from adjacent policy areas.
Where Landscape Policy Meets Renewable Energy
One of the sharpest contemporary tensions for the Convention involves renewable energy infrastructure. Large wind farms and extensive solar arrays transform the visual character, ecological function, and cultural identity of the landscapes they occupy. Greece provides a vivid case study. Researchers reviewing the impacts of large-scale wind energy development there found that the push to meet EU renewable energy targets has repeatedly collided with the ELC’s framework for landscape protection, management, and planning.6Journal of Landscape Ecology. Large-Scale Wind Energy Farm Development and its Impacts on the Landscape: A Review of the Greek Case
The tension is structural, not incidental. Climate policy demands rapid deployment of renewables, which means siting large installations on ridgelines, coastlines, and agricultural land. Landscape policy demands that those same areas be assessed, that public consultation occur, and that the character and identity of the landscape be respected. When deployment targets are aggressive and planning processes slow, landscape considerations tend to lose. The Greek review argued for a different approach: smaller-scale, more distributed energy solutions that respect landscape diversity, paired with rigorous spatial planning and genuine public consultation rather than pro-forma approval hearings.7Journal of Landscape Ecology. Large-Scale Wind Energy Farm Development and its Impacts on the Landscape: A Review of the Greek Case
This is not just a Greek problem. Across signatory states, planning authorities face similar trade-offs every time a new wind farm, solar park, or transmission line is proposed. The Convention does not oppose development; it insists that development account for landscape impacts and that affected communities participate in decisions. In practice, how seriously that insistence is taken varies case by case, and the answer often depends on whether landscape obligations are written into the permitting process or merely referenced in non-binding guidelines.
The Shift Toward Dynamic Conservation
For most of its life, conservation thinking has been built on the assumption that the goal is to hold a valued place in its current state. Freeze the forest, protect the wetland, maintain the meadow. The Convention’s language reflects this instinct: protect, manage, plan. But a growing body of research argues that this approach misses something fundamental about how landscapes work.
Landscapes are not static. They are shaped by disturbance regimes, climate variability, species migration, and human activity over decades and centuries. A recent paper in BioScience made the case bluntly: relying too heavily on the stationarity of conditions and features will end up harming the very things conservationists are trying to protect.8BioScience. Conserving landscape dynamics, not just landscapes Against the backdrop of a warming climate, the precautionary principle itself argues for embracing change rather than resisting it. Protecting a place and allowing it to evolve are not mutually exclusive. The paper urged a pivot from conserving landscapes as fixed entities toward conserving the dynamics that keep landscapes ecologically functional.
For the Convention, this creates an interesting philosophical challenge. If a landscape is defined partly by how people perceive it, and people perceive it as the place they know and love, then allowing that landscape to change through fire, flooding, species shifts, or managed retreat can feel like a betrayal of the Convention’s promise. Yet clinging to a snapshot of how things looked in 2004 could produce an increasingly artificial result, requiring ever more intervention to maintain conditions that the climate no longer supports. Signatory states will eventually need to reconcile the Convention’s commitment to landscape character with the ecological reality that character must be allowed to shift.
Mapping and Monitoring at Scale
None of the Convention’s objectives work without accurate, up-to-date information about what landscapes actually look like and how they are changing. That is where remote sensing and geographic information systems come in. Satellite imagery, aerial surveys, and digital mapping tools have made it possible to classify land cover, track habitat changes over time, and model habitat suitability for key species across broad areas.9Landscape and Urban Planning. Mapping and indicator approaches for the assessment of habitats at different scales using remote sensing and GIS methods
These tools support the Convention at every stage. During identification and assessment, GIS analysis helps delineate landscape units and characterize their features. During planning, spatial data can show where land-use change is accelerating, where ecological corridors are fragmented, and where new development would have the greatest visual or ecological impact. During monitoring, repeat satellite passes can detect changes that would take years to notice from the ground: the gradual loss of hedgerows, the expansion of impervious surfaces, or the encroachment of forest onto abandoned farmland.
The limitation is that satellite data captures physical conditions, not perception. A pixel can tell you that vegetation cover dropped by a certain percentage, but it cannot tell you whether the local community considers that change a loss. Combining digital landscape monitoring with the social surveys and participatory methods the Convention demands is an ongoing technical and institutional challenge. Some countries have invested heavily in integrated platforms that overlay ecological data with cultural and perceptual information; others rely on piecemeal mapping that may be outdated by the time planners use it.
The Landscape Award
Beyond its legal and planning mechanisms, the Convention operates a less-noticed but symbolically important recognition program. The Council of Europe Landscape Award is given periodically to exemplary projects that demonstrate how landscape protection, management, or planning can be done well. The award is open to local and regional authorities, civil society groups, and other organizations within signatory states.104D TájépÃtészeti és Kertművészeti Folyóirat. The European Landscape Convention of the Council of Europe and the Landscape Award of the Council of Europe
Winning projects have ranged from river restoration efforts and urban greening initiatives to community-led preservation of agricultural terraces. The award is not large in monetary terms, but it functions as a signal to other authorities and communities about what good practice looks like. In a treaty system where enforcement is weak and implementation depends on political will, visible recognition of success stories serves as one of the few tools for encouraging ambition. Countries that participate in the award cycle also generate case studies that researchers and planners in other signatory states can learn from, creating a slow but cumulative knowledge base about what actually works when the Convention’s ideals meet local realities.
Why Non-European Countries Are Watching
The Convention is formally a Council of Europe treaty, so its signatories are European. But its influence extends beyond the continent. The basic idea that all landscapes deserve policy attention, not just scenic or protected ones, has resonated with planners and researchers in Latin America, East Asia, and parts of Africa. The ELC model of combining identification, assessment, public participation, quality objectives, and cross-sector integration offers a template that other regions can adapt to their own legal and cultural contexts.
That said, the Convention’s European origins show. Its assumptions about governance, about the relationship between citizens and the state, and about the role of planning are rooted in a specific political tradition. Countries with very different land tenure systems, weaker administrative capacity, or more centralized decision-making face different obstacles. The Convention is less a blueprint to be imported whole than a set of principles that other countries can test against their own conditions. Its most portable insight may be the simplest: if you do not have a policy for landscape, you still have a landscape policy. It is just one you never chose.