Searching for the Future of Land: Scenarios from the Local to Global Scale

Scenarios of land-use change in a deforestation corridor in the Brazilian Amazon: combining two scales of analysis

“…They describe qualitative (story lines) and quantitative developments with a focus on the BR-163 highway. The story lines encompass possible ecological, societal, economic, and political developments in the study region until 2030 and were translated into their potential meaning for population change, agricultural development, and land-use policy, following a similar structure to the story and simulation approach described by Alcamo (2008). We extracted statements from the story lines that referred to each of the three groups and interpreted them in terms of their potential meaning for the land-use modeling process (Table 2).…”

“…Methods vary between cellular automata or rule-based approaches, empirical or statistical models, agent-based models, macroeconomic models, land-use accounting models, and integrated approaches that combine different methodologies (Alcamo et al 2006;Brown et al 2014). The increasing understanding of the complexity of land-use change and linkages within the earth system (e.g., land-use changes that depend on teleconnections, indirect land-use changes, or displacement) calls for reconsidering the traditional understanding of a closed system at one spatial scale (Arima et al 2011;Dalla-Nora et al 2014;Gollnow and Lakes 2014;Lapola et al 2010;Meyfroidt et al 2013;Richards et al 2014).…”

“…Additional shortcomings relate to a lack of transparency in terms of quantifying, calibrating, and validating the models (Rosa et al 2014). Recommendations for future scenario assessments include integrating global and regional models to improve the structure and consistency of Amazonian land-use/cover change assessments (Alcamo et al 2006;Dalla-Nora et al 2014). Cross-scale linkages of land-use change processes may be especially true for regions that are dominated by the production of agricultural goods for export markets.…”

“…Combining different land-use data sets at different scales involves challenges related to spatial accuracy, precision, and the thematic comparability of the classifications. It remains challenging to develop and apply approaches that link different scales of land-use models, including different sources of spatial information on land use, to provide consistent scenarios across scales (Alcamo et al 2006;Dalla-Nora et al 2014).…”

An effective tool to support Sustainability Transitions

“…Scenarios however can be perceived as a special kind of assessments in that their future orientation dramatically increases the degree of complexity and uncertainty involved. To reflect the need for innovative thinking about possibilities and surprises in scenario-based studies, Alcamo et al (2006) proposed creativity as an additional criterion. Based on these findings from the literature, the hypothesis became: Scenarios tend to be influential in policy to the degree that they are perceived as simultaneously credible, salient, legitimate, and creative by the scenario users.…”