The importance of uncertainties in scenario analyses – A study on future ecosystem service delivery in Flanders

Abstract

Land use is rapidly changing and is significantly affecting ecosystem service delivery all around the world. The socio-economic context and political choices largely determine land use change. This land use change, driven by socio-economic pressures, will impact diverse elements of the environment including, for example, air quality, soil properties, water infiltration and food and wood production, impacts that can be linked to the provisioning of ecosystem services. To gain more insight into the effects of alternative socio-economic developments on ecosystem service delivery, land use change models are being coupled to ecosystem service delivery models to perform scenario analyses. Although the uncertainty of the results of these kind of scenario analyses are generally far from negligible, studies rarely take them into account. In this study, a cellular automaton land use change model is coupled to Bayesian belief network ecosystem service delivery models to facilitate the study of error propagation in scenario analysis. The proposed approach is applied to model the impact of alternative socio-economic developments on ecosystem service delivery in Flanders, Belgium and to assess the impact of land use allocation uncertainty on the uncertainty associated to future ecosystem service delivery. Results suggest that taking into account uncertainties may have an effect on policy recommendations that come out of the scenario analysis. However, in this study, uncertainties in the applied ecosystem service models were dominant, reducing the importance of accounting for land use allocation uncertainty.