The effect of forest owner decision-making, climatic change and societal demands on land-use change and ecosystem service provision in Sweden

Abstract

The uncertain effects of climatic change and changing demands for ecosystem services on the distribution of forests and their levels of service provision require assessments of future land-use change, ecosystem service provision, and how ecosystem service demands may be met. We present CRAFTY-Sweden, an agent-based, land-use model that incorporates land owner behaviour and decision-making in modelling future ecosystem service provision in the Swedish forestry sector. Future changes were simulated under scenarios of socio-economic and climatic change between 2010 and 2100. The simulations indicate that the influence of climatic change (on land productivities) may be less important than that of socio-economic change or behavioural differences. Simulations further demonstrate that the variability in land owner and societal behaviour has a substantial role in determining the direction and impact of land-use change. The results indicate a sizeable increase in timber harvesting in coming decades, which together with a substantial decoupling between supply and demand for forest ecosystem services highlights the challenge of continuously meeting demands for ecosystem services over long periods of time. There is a clear need for model applications of this kind to better understand the variation in ecosystem service provision in the forestry sector, and other associated land-use changes.