Beyond land cover change: towards a new generation of land use models

Verburg, P.H.; Alexander, Peter; Evans, Tom; Magliocca, Nicholas R.; Malek, Žiga; Rounsevell, Mark; Vliet, Jasper van

doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2019.05.002

Cited by 147 publications

(71 citation statements)

References 78 publications

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“…Although many studies have proposed LUCC prediction models, most of them focused on urbanization (Hepinstall et al 2008;Halmy et al 2015), and so far there have been few cases applied to natural ecosystems at a large scale. At present, it is still very difficult to make a reasonable prediction of land use change on dozens or even hundreds of years, further studies are still required (Verburg et al 2019).…”

Section: Advantages Of Our Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the vulnerability of ecosystems to climate change based on climate exposure, vegetation stability and productivity

Wang

Jiang

et al. 2020

For. Ecosyst.

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Background: Global warming has brought many negative impacts on terrestrial ecosystems, which makes the vulnerability of ecosystems one of the hot issues in current ecological research. Here, we proposed an assessment method based on the IPCC definition of vulnerability. The exposure to future climate was characterized using a moisture index (MI) that integrates the effects of temperature and precipitation. Vegetation stability, defined as the proportion of intact natural vegetation that remains unchanged under changing climate, was used together with vegetation productivity trend to represent the sensitivity and adaptability of ecosystems. Using this method, we evaluated the vulnerability of ecosystems in Southwestern China under two future representative concentration pathways (RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5) with MC2 dynamic global vegetation model. Results: (1) Future (2017-2100) climate change will leave 7.4% (under RCP 4.5) and 57.4% of (under RCP 8.5) of areas under high or very high vulnerable climate exposure; (2) in terms of vegetation stability, nearly 45% of the study area will show high or very high vulnerability under both RCPs. Beside the impacts of human disturbance on natural vegetation coverage (vegetation intactness), climate change will cause obvious latitudinal movements in vegetation distribution, but the direction of movements under two RCPs were opposite due to the difference in water availability; (3) vegetation productivity in most areas will generally increase and remain a low vulnerability in the future; (4) an assessment based on the above three aspects together indicated that future climate change will generally have an adverse impact on all ecosystems in Southwestern China, with non-vulnerable areas account for only about 3% of the study area under both RCPs. However, compared with RCP 4.5, the areas with mid-and highvulnerability under RCP 8.5 scenario increased by 13% and 16%, respectively. Conclusion: Analyses of future climate exposure and projected vegetation distribution indicate widespread vulnerability of ecosystems in Southwestern China, while vegetation productivity in most areas will show an increasing trend to the end of twenty-first century. Based on new climate indicators and improved vulnerability assessment rules, our method provides an extra option for a more comprehensive evaluation of ecosystem vulnerability, and should be further tested at larger spatial scales in order to provide references for regional, or even global, ecosystem conservation works.

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Section: Advantages Of Our Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the vulnerability of ecosystems to climate change based on climate exposure, vegetation stability and productivity

Wang

Jiang

et al. 2020

For. Ecosyst.

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“…The challenge to engage different actors and land users within and outside the landscape has been another barrier for implementing ILM (Reed et al 2016;Arts et al 2017). Land change scenarios that aim to clarify and visualize the uncertainties intrinsic to the future can facilitate dialog among key stakeholders and can provide a platform for envisioning what land use ambitions could look like for the landscape (Bürgi et al 2017;Meijer et al 2018;Verburg et al 2019). Such visualizations are common in discussing small-scale landscape interventions (Tieskens et al 2017;Zagaria et al 2017) but could play a similar role in the context of shaping subnational frameworks to harmonize with global environmental policy targets.…”

Section: Implications For Integrated Landscape Managementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contextualizing local landscape initiatives in global change: a scenario study for the high forest zone, Ghana

et al. 2020

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Integrated landscape management (ILM) has received increased interest to reconcile multiple conflicting demands on a landscape scale. ILM aims at addressing major interconnected global challenges, such as poverty, food security, deforestation, and climate change. A principal element of ILM is the consideration of multiple scales, harmonizing local-level needs and ambitions with those that derive from outside the landscape. ILM initiatives are most often initiated by local actors focusing on local priorities, thereby insufficiently realizing that the landscape is embedded in a wider macroeconomic and societal context. We contextualize a landscape initiative located in the high forest zone of southern Ghana, focusing on global socioeconomic and political developments that are expected to have an influence on the region. We built two “sustainability” scenarios for the period between 2015 and 2030, reflecting the demands and ambitions of local stakeholders (bottom-up) and of global environmental policy (top-down) for the region. We find that global climate and cocoa production priorities could induce synergies between food production, biodiversity conservation, and climate change mitigation at the scale of the case study region but could come at the cost of mixed forest systems that play an important role in livelihoods on the landscape scale. Land change scenarios can play a critical role in assessing and visualizing such interactions and provide a platform for discussion and negotiation on how to integrate different objectives in the design of landscape initiatives.

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“…Improved knowledge of human decision-making in land-use change is crucial to advance our understanding of how underlying drivers of land-use change are moderated through human agency in different ways (Verburg et al 2019). Insights in decision-making process at individual level can help to ensure policies that are tailored to the diverse needs of land managers.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Local land-use decision-making in a global context

Malek

Douw

Vliet

et al. 2019

Environ. Res. Lett.

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Land-use change has transformed the majority of the terrestrial biosphere, impacting biodiversity, climate change, food production and provision of multiple ecosystem services. To improve our understanding of land-use change processes, the motivations and characteristics of land-use decisionmakers need to be addressed more explicitly. Here, we systematically review the peer-reviewed literature between 1950 and 2018 that documents decision-making underlying land-use change processes. We found 315 publications reporting on 559 case studies worldwide that report on land-use decision-making in sufficient depth. In these cases, we identified 758 land-use decision-makers. We clustered decision-makers based on their objectives, attitudes and abilities into six distinct types: survivalist, subsistence-oriented smallholder, market-oriented smallholder, professional commercialist, professional intensifier and eco-agriculturalist. Survival and livelihood were identified as most common objectives for land-use decision makers, followed by economic objectives. We observe large differences in terms of decision-makers' attitudes towards environmental values, and particularly their financial status, while decision makers have a generally favorable attitude towards change and legislation. The majority of the documented decision-makers in the literature have only few abilities as they are poor and own small plots of land, while the wealthier decision-makers were identified to have more power and control over their decisions. Based on a representativeness analysis, we found that decision-making processes in marginal areas, such as mountainous regions, are overrepresented in existing case study evidence, while remote areas and lowlands are under-represented. These insights can help in the design of better land-use change assessments, as well as to improve policies towards sustainable land use.

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Beyond land cover change: towards a new generation of land use models

Cited by 147 publications

References 78 publications

Assessing the vulnerability of ecosystems to climate change based on climate exposure, vegetation stability and productivity

Assessing the vulnerability of ecosystems to climate change based on climate exposure, vegetation stability and productivity

Contextualizing local landscape initiatives in global change: a scenario study for the high forest zone, Ghana

Local land-use decision-making in a global context

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