TY - JOUR
T1 - Agent‐based modelling of alternative futures in the British land use system
AU - Brown, C
AU - Seo, B
AU - Alexander, P
AU - Burton, V
AU - Chacón‐montalván, Ea
AU - Dunford, R
AU - Merkle, M
AU - Harrison, Pa
AU - Prestele, R
AU - Robinson, El
AU - Rounsevell, M
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the Helmholtz Association, the Natural Environment Research Council award number NE/R016429/1 as part of the UK‐SCAPE programme delivering National Capability (SPEED project), the UK Climate Resilience Programme (award number CR19‐3) and the Forestry Commission. In addition, ECM was supported by UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funded Data Science of the Natural Environment (DSNE) project (award number EP/R01860X/1). PAH was partially supported by the Natural Environmental Research Council award number NE/T003952/1. PA was funded by UK's Global Food Security Programme project Resilience of the UK food system to Global Shocks (RUGS, BB/N020707/1). RP was funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) with funds from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). PAH, RD and ELR would also like to thank James Bullock for his insightful comments on the climate, socio‐economic and land use scenarios through the SPEED project ( https://uk-scape.ceh.ac.uk/our-science/projects/SPEED ). We acknowledge support by the IT department of IMK‐IFU, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology for model running and data processing. We also gratefully acknowledge the computational and data resources provided by the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre ( www.lrz.de ), through the project ‘Global Agent Based Land Use Modelling (pn69tu)’. Open access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.
Funding Information:
This work was supported by the Helmholtz Association, the Natural Environment Research Council award number NE/R016429/1 as part of the UK-SCAPE programme delivering National Capability (SPEED project), the UK Climate Resilience Programme (award number CR19-3) and the Forestry Commission. In addition, ECM was supported by UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funded Data Science of the Natural Environment (DSNE) project (award number EP/R01860X/1). PAH was partially supported by the Natural Environmental Research Council award number NE/T003952/1. PA was funded by UK's Global Food Security Programme project Resilience of the UK food system to Global Shocks (RUGS, BB/N020707/1). RP was funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) with funds from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). PAH, RD and ELR would also like to thank James Bullock for his insightful comments on the climate, socio-economic and land use scenarios through the SPEED project (https://uk-scape.ceh.ac.uk/our-science/projects/SPEED). We acknowledge support by the IT department of IMK-IFU, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology for model running and data processing. We also gratefully acknowledge the computational and data resources provided by the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (www.lrz.de), through the project ‘Global Agent Based Land Use Modelling (pn69tu)’. Open access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Authors. Earth's Future published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Geophysical Union.
PY - 2022/10/11
Y1 - 2022/10/11
N2 - Socio-economic scenarios such as the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) have been widely used to analyse global change impacts, but representing their diversity is a challenge for the analytical tools applied to them. Taking Great Britain as an example, we represent a set of stakeholder-elaborated UK-SSP scenarios, linked to climate change scenarios (Representative Concentration Pathways), in a globally-embedded agent-based modelling framework. We find that distinct model components are required to account for divergent behavioural, social and societal conditions in the SSPs, and that these have dramatic impacts on land system outcomes. From strong social networks and environmental sustainability in SSP1 to land consolidation and technological intensification in SSP5, scenario-specific model designs vary widely from one another and from present-day conditions. Changes in social and human capitals reflecting social cohesion, equality, health and education can generate impacts larger than those of technological and economic change, and comparable to those of modelled climate change. We develop an open-access, transferrable model framework and provide UK-SSP projections to 2080 at 1km2 resolution, revealing large differences in land management intensities, provision of a range of ecosystem services, and the knowledge and motivations underlying land manager decision-making. These differences suggest the existence of large but underappreciated areas of scenario space, within which novel options for land system sustainability could occur.
AB - Socio-economic scenarios such as the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) have been widely used to analyse global change impacts, but representing their diversity is a challenge for the analytical tools applied to them. Taking Great Britain as an example, we represent a set of stakeholder-elaborated UK-SSP scenarios, linked to climate change scenarios (Representative Concentration Pathways), in a globally-embedded agent-based modelling framework. We find that distinct model components are required to account for divergent behavioural, social and societal conditions in the SSPs, and that these have dramatic impacts on land system outcomes. From strong social networks and environmental sustainability in SSP1 to land consolidation and technological intensification in SSP5, scenario-specific model designs vary widely from one another and from present-day conditions. Changes in social and human capitals reflecting social cohesion, equality, health and education can generate impacts larger than those of technological and economic change, and comparable to those of modelled climate change. We develop an open-access, transferrable model framework and provide UK-SSP projections to 2080 at 1km2 resolution, revealing large differences in land management intensities, provision of a range of ecosystem services, and the knowledge and motivations underlying land manager decision-making. These differences suggest the existence of large but underappreciated areas of scenario space, within which novel options for land system sustainability could occur.
U2 - 10.1029/2022EF002905
DO - 10.1029/2022EF002905
M3 - Article
JO - Earth's Future
JF - Earth's Future
SN - 2328-4277
M1 - e2022EF002905
ER -