Themes and topics for theses
- Agri-Food Business Management
- Environmental Governance and Adaptation to Climate Change
- Fisheries and applied ecology
- Horticulture
- Landscape Architecture (BSc: Environmental Planning and Landscape Design)
- Landscape Protection and Preservation
- Nature Tourism
- Production and Marketing of Agricultural Products
• Ecosystem disservices and their integration to inclusive urban planning
Supervisor: Anton Shkaruba (Estonian University of Life Sciences)
Functions and properties of ecosystems delivering discomfort to citizens, also known as ecosystem disservices (EDS) are fundamentally important in terms of interactions between people and urban nature and can be at least as important for citizens as ecosystem services (ES). This further leads to the call for the solutions whereas ES as well as EDS are integrated in planning designs delivering comfortable urban environment to citizens. This however represents a major challenge not only due to many trade-offs, such as choices between space and commercial development benefits vs. ES, but also due to conflicting perspectives and preferences of various stakeholder, epistemic and social groups on the very nature of EDS and ES. We assume that there are at least two compelling reasons for EDS to be addressed by the planning process in its broad sense. This is for urban nature in order to survive, and for citizens in order to benefit from the ser-vices it provides. This needs to entail the formulation of multistakeholder consensus over EDS/ES, and ideally to consider the broadest possible variety of interest groups (including age and gender) and possible conflicting perspectives. Working to address this challenge, this research would focus on EDS in urban communities, and explore them in terms of inclusive planning.
There is a magnitude of ways to approach the issue depending on interests and qualifications of a student. The thesis could explore a location which is of interest to a student (Tartu would be encouraged but not insisted as a possible choice), or the cities of Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia, Can Tho in Vietnam or Pondicherry in India (funding for field trips is potentially available), which are the locations of project currently run by the Chair.