At its 9th online Plenary Session (Strasbourg, 10-13 November 2020), the Steering Committee for Culture, Heritage and Landscape of the Council of Europe took note with interest of the Lausanne Declaration on “Landscape integration in sectoral policies”. The Declaration considers: the powerful symbolic significance of the landscape, which feeds on the sources of the social imagination; its structural role as a lever for sustainable development based on a harmonious balance between the environmental, social, cultural, and economic dimensions; and the importance of the landscape with regard to the challenges of health, food and energy, as well as addressing the challenges resulting from climate change, the disappearance of living species, pollution of the water and air, degradation of agricultural and forest soils, and artificialisation of land.
The Declaration stresses the need to systematically integrate the landscape dimension into policies which may have a direct or indirect impact on the quality of the landscape, in accordance with the provisions of the European Landscape Convention.
