Development of a system dynamics model for sustainable land use management

Abstract

The current land use management framework considers economic, social, and environmental influences individually, making it difficult to achieve sustainable development. Therefore, this study aims to develop a system dynamics model to help decision makers to integrally and systematically consider the components and interactions in land use management. Based on the concept of sustainable development, this study uses systems thinking to develop dynamics of sustainable land use management in a river basin, which considers human activities, land resources, water resources, and air resources integrally. Furthermore, this study uses the concept of driving forcestate‐response to establish a conceptual dynamics framework for sustainable land use management. Because of the complicated interactions among the above components and iterative decision‐making procedures, this study uses Vensim software and the concept of object‐oriented programming to develop a sustainable land use management system dynamics model (SLUMSD model) based on the conceptual dynamics framework. The Nankan river basin is used as a case study to illustrate the capability of the SLUMSD model. The case study indicates that the interactions among the components in sustainable land use management can be effectively identified in the SLUMSD model. While planning strategies for sustainable land use management, decision‐makers can use the SLUMSD model to understand how the components vary with different alternatives. Using the SLUMSD model to iteratively modify alternatives can ensure appropriate decision‐making in sustainable land use management.