ateam - Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

ATEAM final report Section 5 and 6 (2001-2004) 17
Regional level land use specific quantification of scenarios
At the regional level, changes in land use areas for each land use type were estimated. One of the
important issues when dealing with land use change in Europe is that these changes will also be
affected by events outside of Europe. This is especially important in relation to trends in global trade.
Thus, land use in Europe reflects not only demand (and supply) of the internal market, but also the
demand for land based goods (e.g. food, wood products) that derive from outside of Europe. Estimation
of these demands required the use of an integrated assessment model that simulates global trade
patterns. In the work reported here, results from the IMAGE 2.2 model were used for this purpose.
IMAGE provides for OECD 13 Europe (and for each of the considered scenarios) demands for
agricultural and forestry products (including animal products, food crops, grass and fodder species,
wood and biofuel crops). These demands were used both directly in the quantitative assessments for
agriculture, and as a cross-check for the forestry land use change areas.
Urban land use
The following driving forces of urban land use change were identified: population, economics,
accessibility of a location with respect to the transport network, the distance to large cities, the distance
to medium sized cities and the distance to small cities. The city distances are distinguished according to
city size in order to reflect the different impacts and attractiveness of a larger or a smaller city, and in
order to simulate the different patterns of sub-urbanisation and counter-urbanisation processes. For
each of the driving forces, indicators were chosen or calculated that were applied to an empiricalstatistical
model integrating theory and empirical data on urban land use. The results for each scenario
show alternative patterns of future urban distributions, diffuse or concentrated, with larger increases in
urbanisation close to large cities, or in rural areas.
Protected areas
Whilst the location of protected areas may change, it is assumed that the land use within a protected
area will not change from the baseline, whatever the land use type and whatever the scenario.
The main driving force for protected areas is European and national policy for nature conservation.
Other driving forces include policies for agriculture, forestry and spatial planning, as well as the demand
for (green) recreation and tourism. An assumption is made that for all scenarios 20% of the area of
Europe will have been designated as protected by 2080. Whilst the amount of new protected areas is
the same for all scenarios, this target is assumed to be reached for different reasons: the economic
scenarios require areas for recreation for a richer population, whereas the environmental scenarios
have protection for conservation purposes. The allocation (location) of these protected areas between
scenarios is assumed, however, to vary substantially. For the regional scenarios (A2, B2) the target is
reached locally (country-level) and for the global scenarios (A1, B1) it is reached European-wide.
Furthermore, for the A1 and A2 scenarios, economic priorities are assumed to lead to an opportunistic
strategy for the location of new protected areas: their selection is based on the minimisation of
opportunity costs. Basically, less valuable land is designated for protection. For the B1 and B2
scenarios, environmental priorities lead to a conservation strategy for the designation of new areas, and
an assumption is made that new areas will maximise the conservation potential and biodiversity.
Allocation rules are based, therefore, on the distribution of species and the need to conserve a
maximum of species. For this purpose, biodiversity modelling results from WP2 were fed back into the
land use modelling procedure.
Agriculture and biofuels
The driving forces for agricultural land use change are: world demand and supply, market intervention
(through agricultural policy), rural development policy, environmental policy pressure, impact of EU
13 OECD = Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.