Exploring land use scenarios, an alternative approach based on actual land use

Abstract

Land use scenarios should be able to describe land use as a result of changing biophysical and socioeconomic conditions, as well as the pathways of possible future developments including feedbacks between land use and its drivers. Several approaches exist, to date, to develop regional and national scenarios: (a) explorative biophysical studies which explore the biophysical boundaries of the ‘solution space’; (b) socioeconomic explorative studies which couple calculated biophysical potentials with crude socioeconomic estimates. An alternative approach, based on actual and past land use and its biophysical and demographic drivers as integrated within the multi-scale land use change model CLUE, is presented and discussed. In combination with existing explorative approaches, this approach may contribute to more realistic land use projection scenarios.