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Modelling the socio-economic, greenhouse gas and natural capital impacts of land use policy and opportunities (2)

Modelling the socio-economic, greenhouse gas and natural capital impacts of land use policy and opportunities (2)

  • Natural Capital
  • 2022-2027
Sustainable Development icon: sustainable cities and communities
Sustainable Development icon: climate action
Sustainable Development icon: life on land

Challenges

Rural land use occupies a pivotal position in some of the major debates about Scotland’s future. It shapes our landscape, contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss, yet offers significant opportunities to address these ‘emergencies’ through new management approaches. Decisions are influenced by and need to balance, a myriad of public and private sector drivers and landowner objectives. As such, the sphere of influence on rural land use crosses over multiple arenas of government activity.

Sustainable land use is vital for underpinning Scotland’s vitally important food and drink and tourism sectors, and as a resource base for economic development. The foundational role of land use means that the small headline economic contributions (GDP or GVA) mask its role in underpinning sustainable and resilient rural economies and communities.

Scotland’s land use sector faces challenges over the next 10-20 years in contributing to legally binding climate change targets. Although the greenhouse gas inventory is constantly evolving, it does not reflect the full heterogeneity of current emissions or the actual potential to improve across Scottish farms. Part of the challenge is that the National Atmospheric Emissions Inventory treats Agriculture and Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) as stand-alone, yet they remain fully integrated with the decisions of land managers.

Scotland’s challenges in land use are being addressed through the adoption of more integrated and cross-sectoral approaches to rural land use, including the creation of Rural Land Use Partnerships (RLUPs), and a greater focus on biodiversity and natural capital outcomes. The response and effectiveness of policy and management changes will vary spatially reflecting socio-economic and environmental conditions creating the need to better understand these spatial patterns and configure policy accordingly.

The key drivers of this project are:

  • Opportunities and constraints on land use depend on the economic impacts on land-based businesses and the condition of the underlying natural capital assets.
  • Responses to, analysis of, policy and land use change need to reflect these varying socio-ecological contexts.
  • The multiple benefits of land use are increasingly recognised as being crucial for sustainable land use, so need to be jointly considered in land use policy analysis and management.

Questions

  • What are the key gaps in current natural capital valuation?
  • Which of the natural assets that are not currently included in natural capital measurement should be prioritised for valuation methodology development?
  • Are there other dimensions of value that would be helpful to incorporate?

Solutions

This project generates new insights into how land use in Scotland could change to meet climate change mitigation, adaptation, and other environmental objectives. We consider how approaches to land use can be better joined up, for example, through Regional Land Use Partnerships.

 

Emissions and environmental goals 

We integrate a wide range of spatial modelling (map data and systems models) to create opportunity and risk maps for alternative land uses under current and future climate regimes. The spatial analysis considers both current and future capability for agricultural, forestry and sporting use but also what the mix of land uses, and their intensity implies for the basket of ecosystem goods and services delivered at a range of scales (national, regional, landscape). The analysis also links farm structure data with the mapping of ecosystem goods and services to contextualise biophysical analysis with other drivers of change such as business viability, land manager behaviour and changes in tenure or ownership. These components underpin multi-objective analyses: how much change is needed; how an agreed objective can be delivered while minimising unintended consequences; simulating “what ifs” or defining the structure of trade-offs between objectives.

 

Joined-up approaches to managing land

This project explores policy coherence to support emerging institutions such as Regional Land Use Partnerships. The research is identifying relevant actors (agriculture, forestry, sporting, conservation, tourism), characterising how the institutional landscape joins up horizontally (between policies) and vertically (from objective to implementation), and highlights solutions that can address the issues identified. This is complemented by outputs from another project split into phase 1 and phase 2 and an analysis of stories about land use change past, present and future, contrasting official sources with those from other actors using an array of conventional, sensory, and ethnographic methods. To do this we are conducting cycles of transdisciplinary Quantitative Story Telling (QST) through co-construction with national or regional policy actors: defining both the scope of analysis and the interpretation of the outcomes. This approach is providing detailed state of play for land use research capabilities.

 

Change, Resilience and Adaptation

This project conducts damage screening of climate change impacts across agricultural, forestry and peatland systems. It also assesses the consequences of climate change for resilience, looking at a range of ecosystem functions across scales, linking field and parcel and business-scale analyses with assessments of multifunctionality at landscape scales. These specific analyses are shaped by higher-level analysis that contextualises land use change scenarios by linking the Shared Socio-Economic Pathways developed elsewhere. This tests how these assumptions might play out in space across Scotland and assess their outcomes.

 

Exploring the wider impacts

We are monitoring and evaluating QST processes to learn how the data, tools, and processes combined to deliver the anticipated impacts and the degree to which QST would shape science-policy processes. The QST processes are good examples of how open science can be delivered at the research-policy and research-stakeholder interfaces to engage the wider public of Scotland by making the research outputs more accessible. To foster wider engagement with other UK social and rural researchers on the data being generated within the project, we are running a mid-project digital-LUC stories hackathon (an event where people come together to collaborate to develop solutions).

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