Large-scale Behavioural Models of Land Use Change

The working group will support the development of the next generation of large-scale (global to continental/national scales), land-use models that are based on human behaviour, agency and decision-making processes. The purpose of this approach is to explore a wide range of key research (and policy) questions at the nexus of food, ecosystems, water, climate and energy. This will support understanding of adaptation and mitigation processes within the land system in which the land system is used as an exemplar of other socio-ecological systems. The working group will create an alternative to the current range of ‘top-down’ global models (based on macro-economics) and thus, will provide a working laboratory to test theories of human decision making, and undertake social simulation experiments in a globally (inter-)connected world, i.e. taking account of telecoupling. This includes new representations of institutional processes and their relationships with local land users. We also envisage coupling of large-scale, land-use models with other models types, such as Dynamic Global Vegetation Models (DGVMs), 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. In practice, we will work towards a common ‘modelling framework’, or a suite of models operating within a common structure. This reflects the many different ways of modelling land use change processes, especially with respect to theories of land-use decision-making. We will explore alternative realisations of these decisional processes within the common modelling framework. All model results will be made available to the broader community through an online portal.