Models for policy-making in sustainable development: The state of the art and perspectives for research

Agent-based modeling of complex social–ecological feedback loops to assess multi-dimensional trade-offs in dryland ecosystem services

“…ABM offers a way of incorporating heterogeneous human and environmental entities and feedback loops at multiple scales in a spatially-explicit manner (Matthews et al 2007). This modeling structure is well-suited to represent the characteristics of H-E systems, and spatio-temporal simulation with ABM is capable of assessing ecosystem service trade-offs (Boulanger and Brechet 2005;Le 2015).…”

“…If people try to optimize a single ecosystem service, other services can also be affected in adverse and unintended ways. These ''ecosystem service trade-offs'' can occur in spatial, temporal, and social dimensions (Boulanger and Brechet 2005;Seppelt et al 2011). The trade-offs do not always occur in the same place or immediately after human intervention.…”

“…System dynamics models are strong in representing social-ecological dynamics and temporal trade-offs, but rather weak in addressing socialecological heterogeneity and subsequent spatial trade-offs. Spatial optimization models are capable of detecting spatial trade-offs, but have less potential to anticipate temporal ones (Boulanger and Brechet 2005). Spatial Bayesian Network models are excellent for coping with the uncertainty of social-ecological interrelationships, but have poor capacity to understand or represent complex tradeoffs, because when used alone they do not incorporate feedback loops (Kelly et al 2013).…”

“…Although a spatially-explicit, integrated-modeling approach has been used to model complex socialecological dynamics and subsequent ecosystem service trade-offs (Liu et al 2008), recent reviews have showed that many contemporary modeling methods were not able to capture mutual trade-offs over spatial, temporal, and social dimensions (Boulanger and Brechet 2005;Kelly et al 2013;Le 2015). System dynamics models are strong in representing social-ecological dynamics and temporal trade-offs, but rather weak in addressing socialecological heterogeneity and subsequent spatial trade-offs.…”

“…Spatial Bayesian Network models are excellent for coping with the uncertainty of social-ecological interrelationships, but have poor capacity to understand or represent complex tradeoffs, because when used alone they do not incorporate feedback loops (Kelly et al 2013). These conventional spatial modeling approaches do not explicitly represent individual actors, and thereby do not, in principle, capture trade-offs in heterogeneous human communities and landscapes (Boulanger and Brechet 2005;Le 2015).…”