PhD Student: Modelling European land use scenarios to inform sustainable land governance

Alternative strategies for managing land use are key to achieving sustainability targets. At the same time, land use policies often have strong tradeoffs across different sustainability domains and directly affect our living environment and well-being.

This PhD will be part of the EU funded project LAMASUS: LAnd use and MAnagement modelling for SUStainable governance. The LAMASUS project will provide a novel governance model, and the tools required to build sound policies for the land use transition required by the European Green Deal. Key to the project is the analysis of spatial variations in land use impacts of alternative policy implementations across the EU. Within this project, the PhD will bring together spatial assessment models to develop a new generation of high-resolution spatial land system modelling. These models should enable the assessment of alternative policies to reach the green deal policy objectives. While building on existing methods and models, the PhD student will adapt and configure spatial land use models to better fit with the policy questions related to climate policy, agricultural policy and land use planning, and the interactions amongst these. Therewith, the PhD aims at closing gaps at the science-policy interface and contribute to science-based decision making. We look for a PhD student that enjoys spatial analysis and quantitative assessment approaches for making an impact towards more sustainable land use in the EU.