Combining Policy Network and Model-Based Scenario Analyses: An Assessment of Future Ecosystem Goods and Services in Swiss Mountain Regions

Hirschi, Christian; Widmer, Alex; Briner, Simon; Huber, Robert

doi:10.5751/es-05480-180242

Cited by 28 publications

(47 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…The feedback from the policy making process in Huber et al (2013a) is based on the analysis of the interface between policy structures and scientific scenario analysis provided by Hirschi et al (2013). These authors make a first attempt to combine different policy scenario analysis with policy network analysis in agricultural policy.…”

Section: Contents Of This Special Featurementioning

confidence: 99%

Sustainable Land-use Practices in European Mountain Regions under Global Change: an Integrated Research Approach

Huber¹,

Bugmann²,

Buttler³

et al. 2013

E&S

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ABSTRACT. This Special Feature on sustainable land-use practices in European mountain regions presents results from the inter-and transdisciplinary research project MOUNTLAND. The goal was to investigate the sensitivity of the provision of ecosystem services to both climatic and land-use changes and to suggest alternative policies and governance structures for mitigating the impact of such changes and enhancing sustainable management practices in mountain regions. The individual articles provide: (1) new scientific findings regarding the impacts of climate and land-use changes on ecosystem processes in three sensitive mountain regions of Switzerland; (2) an assessment of the feedback effects arising from changing socioeconomic and political conditions, land use, and adaptation to climate change, using modeling techniques and transdisciplinary stakeholder interactions; and (3) suggestions for alternative policy solutions to ensure sustainable land use in mountain regions. In our synthesis of the project, we provide insights from the ecological, socioeconomic, and political sciences in the context of humanenvironment interactions in mountain regions. The innovation of this Special Feature lies in the fact that all articles present truly inter-or transdisciplinary research, ranging from natural sciences to economics and political sciences, based on an overarching set of unifying research questions.

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Section: Contents Of This Special Featurementioning

confidence: 99%

Sustainable Land-use Practices in European Mountain Regions under Global Change: an Integrated Research Approach

Huber¹,

Bugmann²,

Buttler³

et al. 2013

E&S

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“…If aggregated land rent from the corresponding land unit drops below this value, the parcel will no longer be cultivated. The model has been applied in various case studies assessing the impact of different climate and socio-economic scenarios [48][49][50][51]. In these model applications, a comparative static approach was applied because fixed costs of agricultural production are assumed to be independent from existing structures on a longer term.…”

Section: Sector Supply Modeling Approach (Aluam)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The implementation of the agents in the model is analogous to the protocol presented in Huber et al [45] for the applications in the pasture-woodlands of the Swiss Jura. However, instead of individual farms, we treat different groups of farms as one agent and we couple ALUAM-AB to the forest landscape model LandClim [16,51].…”

Section: Agent-based Approach (Aluam-ab)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This comparison allows us to specify the differences and commonalities between two models that address land abandonment with different time horizons by applying different aggregation levels of human decision-making. The results help to assess and interpret existing [48][49][50][51] and future model applications as well as to inform model choice in the context of farmland abandonment and re-forestation in mountain regions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sensitivity Analysis of a Land-Use Change Model with and without Agents to Assess Land Abandonment and Long-Term Re-Forestation in a Swiss Mountain Region

Brändle

Langendijk

Peter³

et al. 2015

Land

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Land abandonment and the subsequent re-forestation are important drivers behind the loss of ecosystem services in mountain regions. Agent-based models can help to identify global change impacts on farmland abandonment and can test policy and management options to counteract this development. Realigning the representation of human decision making with time scales of ecological processes such as reforestation presents a major challenge in this context. Models either focus on the agent-specific behavior anchored in the current generation of farmers at the expense of representing longer scale environmental processes or they emphasize the simulation of long-term economic and forest developments OPEN ACCESSLand 2015, 4 476 where representation of human behavior is simplified in time and space. In this context, we compare the representation of individual and aggregated decision-making in the same model structure and by doing so address some implications of choosing short or long term time horizons in land-use modeling. Based on survey data, we integrate dynamic agents into a comparative static economic sector supply model in a Swiss mountain region. The results from an extensive sensitivity analysis show that this agent-based land-use change model can reproduce observed data correctly and that both model versions are sensitive to the same model parameters. In particular, in both models the specification of opportunity costs determines the extent of production activities and land-use changes by restricting the output space. Our results point out that the agent-based model can capture short and medium term developments in land abandonment better than the aggregated version without losing its sensitivity to important socio-economic drivers. For comparative static approaches, extensive sensitivity analysis with respect to opportunity costs, i.e., the measure of benefits forgone due to alternative uses of labor is essential for the assessment of the impact of climate change on land abandonment and re-forestation in mountain regions.

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“…Policy can restrict or facilitate unsustainable land use and thus affect the efficiency of ecosystem-service supply from smallholders' parcels (Sandker et al 2012, Hirschi et al 2013). Paraguay's first forestry law, Law 422/73 was passed in 1973, but through the turn of the century, the country lacked a centralized ministry of environmental affairs and a holistic, national environmental policy.…”

Section: Pathways To Sustainabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Ecosystem service trade-offs and land use among smallholder farmers in eastern Paraguay

Grossman¹

2015

E&S

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ABSTRACT. The trade-off between economically critical provisioning services and environmentally sustaining supporting services often seems absolute. Yet, when land use is inefficient, managers may be able to increase provision of both economically and ecologically sustaining services. To explore such sustainable "win-win" outcomes, I present a model of predicted trade-offs of provisioning and supporting services on smallholder farms in eastern Paraguay. The spatially implicit model simulates smallholder parcels as mosaics of subsistence agriculture, cattle pasture, eucalyptus plantations, and/or natural forest cover, and predicts provisioning and supporting service supply depending on the relative abundance of each land-use type per parcel. I represent provisioning services as the annual, per-ha proportion of a smallholder family's subsistence needs met by agriculture and forestry. I represent multidimensional supporting services as a composite index of forest bird biodiversity, soil organic carbon content, and aboveground annual net primary productivity (NPP) relative to what would be expected in a stand of high-quality Atlantic Forest. I use this model first to predict ecosystem-service supply for 38 actual smallholder parcels in rural eastern Paraguay, and then to generate an efficiency frontier that illustrates the optimal trade-offs between provisioning and supporting services that are biophysically possible for the system. Comparison of the empirical findings and the efficiency frontier indicates that current land use is inefficient relative to the biophysical optimum. All smallholder parcels included in the study but one lie far from the modeled efficiency frontier, indicating that for a given level of agricultural and forestry production, supporting services are not optimally conserved. If parcel owners were able to overcome constraints to sustainability by, for example, transitioning from cattle ranching to agroforestry production, they could protect high levels (often upward of 90%) of the supporting ecosystem services provided by natural forest without sacrificing economically valuable provisioning services. Pathways to such sustainable outcomes are discussed.

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Combining Policy Network and Model-Based Scenario Analyses: An Assessment of Future Ecosystem Goods and Services in Swiss Mountain Regions

Cited by 28 publications

References 54 publications

Sustainable Land-use Practices in European Mountain Regions under Global Change: an Integrated Research Approach

Sustainable Land-use Practices in European Mountain Regions under Global Change: an Integrated Research Approach

Sensitivity Analysis of a Land-Use Change Model with and without Agents to Assess Land Abandonment and Long-Term Re-Forestation in a Swiss Mountain Region

Ecosystem service trade-offs and land use among smallholder farmers in eastern Paraguay

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