A Participatory Scenario and Spatially Explicit Approach for Envisioning the Future scenarios of Land-Use/Land-cover Change on Ecosystem Service Provisioning to Inform Sustainable Landscape Management: The Case of Coastal Southwestern Ghana

Abstract

Land-use changes such as settlement and commercial agricultural land expansion heavily influence the sustainability of landscapes and ecosystem service (ES) provisioning. Land managers and decision-makers are becoming increasingly concerned about the consequences of land-use change and advocate for integrated approaches to landscape sustainability. Integrated landscape approaches, which incorporate stakeholder views and opinions, are less explored. Especially in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where most of the population relies on natural resources and agricultural land-use products, integrating stakeholder knowledge in evaluating ES and landscape sustainability remain less studied. This study applied a participatory scenario-building approach combined with a spatially explicit simulation to unravel the impact of potential future scenarios based on a business-as-usual (BAU) trajectory of the coastal landscapes in southwestern Ghana. Through workshops, the perceptions of the land-use actors on locally relevant ES, ES indicator values, and the specific simulation conditions of the major land-use change, which is the expansions in rubber plantations (out-grower scheme) and settlements, were identified. The collected local knowledge was integrated into a spatially explicit modeling platform, allowing the visualization and comparison of different scenario impacts, such as synergies or trade-offs between ES. The results presented how land-use actors' perceptions could influence the landscape capacity of ES provisioning. The results indicated risk in ES delivery and landscape sustainability challenges, hence calling for effective land-use policies to control socio-economic activities and increase diversity in land-use under sustainable landscape development.