The Behavioural Models of Land Systems Working Group is a joint venture between the AIMES project and the Global Land Programme. In linking two Global Research Projects of the Future Earth network, the group aims to support and build interdisciplinary collaboration across scientific disciplines. The group welcomes a wide range of perspectives and members with interests in any aspects of human behaviour (e.g., individual, collective, and organisational) in land systems models and its interactions with other land system processes.
The working group supports the development of the next generation of land systems models that represent diverse human behaviour, agency, decision-making and institutional processes. These models explore a wide range of key research and policy questions at the nexus of food, ecosystems, water, climate and energy across multiple land systems and scales (from landscape to regional to global). This approach supports understanding of climate change adaptation and mitigation processes, as well as sustainability transformations, with land systems used as exemplars of other social-ecological and coupled human-natural systems and their components.
The working group promotes alternatives to econometric, equilibrium-based and ‘top-down’ models based on the rational actor model by incorporating insights about human behaviour from the behavioural sciences. This working group encourages rich representations of human behaviour and institutional processes with a focus on the diversity of actors and their interactions with one another and their physical environment, whether proximal or distal in space (e.g., due to telecoupling). Key objectives are to support the construction of a library of models to compare representations of human decision-making, to stimulate social simulation experiments, and to promote identification of actions to support sustainability policies. The working group aims to catalyse the coupling of behavioural land-use models with other model types, such as dynamic global vegetation models, biodiversity models and/or climate emulators to explore a wide range of environmental change drivers and to evaluate the consequences of these for ecosystem services. As such, we welcome scholars and practitioners working on representing human behaviour and social institutions in simulation models spanning a range of topics (including, human behaviour in large-scale simulations and social-ecological contexts, adaptation to climate extremes, and social processes of transformation).
Given the diversity of decision-making contexts globally, many models representing agency, behaviour and social processes (e.g., norms, formal institutions and organisations) in land systems are possible and have been developed. To advance knowledge in this domain the working group advocates the comparison and synthesis of these models and insights generated from them. Through frequent webinars and other activities, the working group will foster an inclusive, active, diverse and cooperative global community of behavioural land system modellers.
The group page on the AIMES project site can be found here.
The overall aim of the working group is to support the creation of the next generation of land systems models that represent diverse human behaviour, agency, decision-making and institutional processes. The specific objectives are to:
Calum Brown
Mark Rounsevell
Maja Schlüter
Tatiana Filatova
Birgit Müller
Derek Robinson
GLP Themes: Land-atmosphere processes, Land management systems
Newsletters
October - December 2022
January - March 2021
October - December 2020
Webinars
Is the idea of large-scale behavioural modelling realistic? (November 2020)
What can land use modellers learn from other disciplines? (April 2021)
King's College London
United Kingdom
Anadolu University
Turkey
Unversity of Mines & Technology
Ghana
Texas A&M University
United States
IAMO
Germany
Federal Polytechnic, Auchi
Nigeria
University of Bern, Switzerland
Switzerland
University of Edinburgh
United Kingdom
KIT, IMK-IFU
Germany
Arizona State University
United States
University of Washington
United States
PNNL
United States
Central University of Venezuela
Venezuela
Lancaster University
United Kingdom
Berkeley Lab
United States
Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and...
Switzerland
University of Twente
Netherlands
Lund University
Sweden
University of Southampton
United Kingdom
Lund University
Sweden
TU Delft / University of Technology Sydney
Netherlands
Boise State University
United States
UNED - Spanish National Distance Education...
Spain
Ministry for the Environment
New Zealand
Consejo Nacionales de Investigaciones Cientifica...
Argentina
NITIDAE
France
Texas A&M University
United States
Centre of Ecology & Hydrology
United Kingdom
The University of Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Inrae
France
University of Bern, Institute of Geography
Switzerland
International Institute for Applied Systems...
Austria
Princeton University
Switzerland
University of Colorado, INSTAAR, CSDMS
United States
University of Oklahoma
United States
YRRE
Ivory Coast
Utrecht University
Netherlands
Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon, Leuphana Universität...
Germany
Johann Heinrich von Thünen Institute, Federal...
Germany
Centre for Development and Environment,...
Switzerland
Universitat Pompeu Fabra / ICREA
Spain
Department of Geography, University of Alabama
United States
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Netherlands
Université Toulouse 2/CNRS
France
UNAM
Mexico
Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL)
Belgium
King's College London
United Kingdom
Wollega University
Ethiopia
Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ
Germany
Bordeaux Sciences Agro (Univ. Bordeaux) / INRA
France
University of Oxford
United Kingdom
University of Johannesburg
South Africa
ATB
Germany
Clark University
United States
University of Waterloo, School of Planning
Canada
King's College London
United Kingdom
The James Hutton Institute
United Kingdom
Kerala State Disaster Management Authority (KSDMA)
India
University of Waterloo
Canada
East Carolina University, Coastal Studies...
United States
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Germany
Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University
Sweden
University of Basel
Switzerland
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
Germany
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Germany
Indiana University
United States
Stanford University
United States
The University of Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in...
Germany
VU University Amsterdam; WSL Switzerland
Netherlands
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
United States
Nanjing University
China
University of Göttingen
Germany
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Netherlands
INTA
Argentina
Joint Global Change Research Institute, PNNL
United States