8 Romanian Danube River Floodplain …
273
The shift to sustainable development is a process of a large-scale, achievable at the
same time by the cooperation of all countries because the effects on the environment
do not know limits imposed by the borders.
8.6 Recommendations
The following three aspects represent a great deal of importance for the spatial
planning problems:
• The systems must be considered as a whole. Therefore, while a manager intervenes
directly only in a limited part of the system, the links will convey the consequences
of these policies to other parts of the system. It may be that the problems faced by
the administrator have originated in actions that have taken place in other parts of
the system to solve simplistically other problems.
• Secondly, human systems and natural systems are dynamic and evolving but never
in balance. That is why administrators intervene in changing the system and, at a
critical point; the consequences of a small intervention may be of great importance.
• The consequences of planning policies depend on the spatial context in which they
are implemented, and how they modify this context.
The Ecological and Economic Resizing Program of the Romanian Danube Floodplain presented a spatial planning tool (SPT) developed in accordance with the three
characteristics and built to design, analyze and evaluate long-term policies in a social,
economic and ecological context.
The main purpose of SPT is to explore the effects of alternative policies on the
quality of the socio-economic and natural environment and to stimulate and facilitate
conscious actions and discussions before public debates are taken place. SPT should
not seek to optimize economic, environmental and social dimensions, but rather to
maximize the whole. Although this involves the loss of details, the advantage of this
approach is the strong integrative side of the resulting system, in which autonomous
processes play an important role. The actions of the current and proposed policies
act against the stakeholders and can be introduced into the SPT system by means of
zonal maps and control parameters that behave like constraints on the autonomous
dynamics of the system.
The main component of the SPT should be a dynamic land use model applied to
the entire territory of the Danube floodplain. To represent the processes that make
and change the configuration of the Danube floodplain requires an overlayered model
to represent processes on three geographical levels: national, regional and local.
Acknowledgements This chapter was compiled within the project “Ecological and Economic
Resizing on Romanian Sector of Danube’s Floodplain” implemented between 2006 and 2008 for
Ministry of Environment as beneficiary. The study was carried out by Danube Delta National
Institute for Research and Development (D.D.N.I.) along with National Institute of Research and
Development for Land Reclamation (I.S.P.I.F.), National Institute of Hydrology and Water Management, (I.N.H.G.A.), and EnviroScopy, from Romania and W.W.F.—Karlsruhe University from
273
The shift to sustainable development is a process of a large-scale, achievable at the
same time by the cooperation of all countries because the effects on the environment
do not know limits imposed by the borders.
8.6 Recommendations
The following three aspects represent a great deal of importance for the spatial
planning problems:
• The systems must be considered as a whole. Therefore, while a manager intervenes
directly only in a limited part of the system, the links will convey the consequences
of these policies to other parts of the system. It may be that the problems faced by
the administrator have originated in actions that have taken place in other parts of
the system to solve simplistically other problems.
• Secondly, human systems and natural systems are dynamic and evolving but never
in balance. That is why administrators intervene in changing the system and, at a
critical point; the consequences of a small intervention may be of great importance.
• The consequences of planning policies depend on the spatial context in which they
are implemented, and how they modify this context.
The Ecological and Economic Resizing Program of the Romanian Danube Floodplain presented a spatial planning tool (SPT) developed in accordance with the three
characteristics and built to design, analyze and evaluate long-term policies in a social,
economic and ecological context.
The main purpose of SPT is to explore the effects of alternative policies on the
quality of the socio-economic and natural environment and to stimulate and facilitate
conscious actions and discussions before public debates are taken place. SPT should
not seek to optimize economic, environmental and social dimensions, but rather to
maximize the whole. Although this involves the loss of details, the advantage of this
approach is the strong integrative side of the resulting system, in which autonomous
processes play an important role. The actions of the current and proposed policies
act against the stakeholders and can be introduced into the SPT system by means of
zonal maps and control parameters that behave like constraints on the autonomous
dynamics of the system.
The main component of the SPT should be a dynamic land use model applied to
the entire territory of the Danube floodplain. To represent the processes that make
and change the configuration of the Danube floodplain requires an overlayered model
to represent processes on three geographical levels: national, regional and local.
Acknowledgements This chapter was compiled within the project “Ecological and Economic
Resizing on Romanian Sector of Danube’s Floodplain” implemented between 2006 and 2008 for
Ministry of Environment as beneficiary. The study was carried out by Danube Delta National
Institute for Research and Development (D.D.N.I.) along with National Institute of Research and
Development for Land Reclamation (I.S.P.I.F.), National Institute of Hydrology and Water Management, (I.N.H.G.A.), and EnviroScopy, from Romania and W.W.F.—Karlsruhe University from