The European Landscape Convention (ELC)

The ELC is the first international treaty specifically on landscape.  This Council of Europe initiative provides a broad framework for the planning and management of all landscapes across member states.  This now includes the UK, who signed and ratified the ELC effective as of 1 March 2007.

CCW is pleased to endorse the ELC definition of ‘landscape’, being “an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors.”

The ELC represents our agreement to some common core principles and actions:

• Putting people – from all cultures and communities – and their surroundings, at the heart of spatial planning and sustainable development.
• Recognising that landscape exists everywhere, not just in special places and, whether beautiful or degraded, is everyone’s shared inheritance.
• Increasing awareness and understanding of landscape and its value, as a unifying framework for all land-use sectors.
• Promoting a more accessible, integrated and forward looking approach to managing inherited landscapes and shaping new landscapes.

These commitments are implemented within the context of our own domestic legal and policy frameworks.   This is important, because it allows us to operate within the existing mechanisms that we have for dealing with our landscapes, building on all the work we have done to date.

Equally important, the ELC takes a realistic and forward looking view, rather than a preservationist one: creating future landscapes is regarded as being just as much an aim as managing sustainably those we have inherited.  

The ELC also stresses that landscape is not merely scenery, but links people with place, culture with nature and past with present.  It stresses that landscape has many values that matter to people (not all tangible), because it is they who create and value the landscape.

CCW champions this view through our work with the Welsh Assembly Government and our partners, on how we can all embrace and help to deliver the ELC’s principles.  This means above all else, making people and places matter more at the heart of landscape planning everywhere in Wales.