The importance of socio-ecological system dynamics in understanding adaptation to global change in the forestry sector

Abstract

Adaptation is necessary to cope with or take advantage of the effects of climate change on socio-ecological systems. This is especially important in the forestry sector, which is sensitive to the ecological and economic impacts of climate change, and where the adaptive decisions of owners play out over long periods of time. Relatively little is known about how successful these decisions are likely to be in meeting demands for ecosystem services in an uncertain future. We explore adaptation to global change in the forestry sector using CRAFTY-Sweden; an agent-based model that represents large-scale land-use dynamics, based on the demand and supply of ecosystem services. Future impacts and adaptation within the Swedish forestry sector were simulated for scenarios of socio-economic change (Shared Socio-economic Pathways) and climatic change (Representative Concentration Pathways, for three climate models), between 2010 and 2100. Substantial differences were found in the competitiveness and coping ability of land owners implementing different management strategies through time. Generally, multi-objective management was found to provide the best basis for adaptation. Across large regions, however, a combination of management strategies was better at meeting ecosystem service demands. Results also show that adaptive capacity evolves through time in response to external (global) drivers and interactions between individual actors. This suggests that process-based models are more appropriate for the study of autonomous adaptation and future adaptive and coping capacities than models based on indicators, discrete time snapshots or exogenous proxies. Nevertheless, a combination of planned and autonomous adaptation by institutions and forest owners is likely to be more successful than either group acting alone.

Societal breakdown as an emergent property of large-scale behavioural models of land use change

“…All necessary input data (described below) are derived from this source, ensuring the transparency and internal consistency of the implementation. This model pairing also allows socio-economic and climatic scenarios to be defined on the basis of comprehensive, cross-sectoral simulations of the European land system that have been extensively evaluated, validated and utilised (Brown et al, 2014a;Harrison et al, 2012Harrison et al, , 2016Harrison et al, , 2019Kebede et al, 2015;Pedde et al, 2019b). Changes in the modelled land system are therefore attributable either to CRAFTY model dynamics (investigated below) or scenario conditions, rather than internal inconsistencies in input data from different sources.…”

“…Alexander et al, 2017;Blanco et al, 2017a;Brown et al, 2014bBrown et al, , 2018bHolzhauer et al, 2019;Murray-Rust et al, 2014), as has the IAP upon which this application of CRAFTY is based (e.g. Brown et al, 2014a;Harrison et al, 2016;Holman et al, 2017;Kebede et al, 2015). Both sets of evaluations have included sensitivity and uncertainty analyses (Brown et al, 2014a(Brown et al, , b, 2018bKebede et al, 2015;Synes et al, 2019), comparisons to empirical data and to the results of other models (Alexander et al, 2017;Blanco et al, 2017a), full descriptions of model design and functioning (Harrison et al, 2015;Murray-Rust et al, 2014), and full free access to the models themselves including interactive online systems for exploring model outputs (Holzhauer et al, 2016;IMPRESSIONS Project, 2018; https://landchange.…”

“…The evaluation of CRAFTY-EU builds on previous evaluations of the agent-based modelling framework from which CRAFTY-EU is implemented, as well as the evaluation of previous comparable implementations. These evaluations have included sensitivity and uncertainty analyses (Arneth et al, 2014;Brown et al, 2014bBrown et al, , 2018bMurray-Rust et al, 2014a), model inter-comparison (Alexander et al, 2017;Holman et al, 2017), and validation against independently simulated and empirical data (Blanco et al, 2017a, b). These evaluations are wholly or partially relevant to CRAFTY-EU as they deal, at least in part, with the basic architecture and parameters of the modelling framework, which are shared between all applications.…”

“…kit.edu/CRAFTY, last access: 3 December 2019). Furthermore, input data have been independently verified and evaluated during the development of the IMPRESSIONS IAP, from which CRAFTY-EU is calibrated (Harrison et al, 2012;Brown et al, 2014a;Kebede et al, 2015;Holman et al, 2017). The evaluation here therefore focuses on the specific European implementation of CRAFTY.…”

Societal breakdown as an emergent property of large-scale behavioural models of land use change

“…Furthermore, alternative treatments of international trade based on assumptions of economic equilibrium would be inconsistent with the supra-economic behavioural approach used in CRAFTY-EU (Arthur, 2006). The relative provision of different services is also subject to substantial uncertainty in our representation of forest growth, with assumed adaptation to changes in species' suitability likely to overestimate real-world adaptation (Schelhaas et al, 2015), as the CRAFTY framework has previously been used to demonstrate (Blanco et al, 2017b(Blanco et al, , 2017a).…”