Abstract
Understanding the links between land-use change (LUC) and climate change is vital in developing effective land-based climate mitigation policies and adaptation measures. Although mitigation and adaptation are human-mediated processes, current global-scale modelling tools do not account for societal learning and other human responses to environmental change. We propose the agent functional type (AFT) method to advance the representation of these processes, by combining socio-economics (agent-based modelling) with natural sciences (dynamic global vegetation models). Initial AFT-based simulations show the emergence of realistic LUC patterns that reflect known LUC processes, demonstrating the potential of the method to enhance our understanding of the role of people in the Earth system.
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25 June 2014
In the print version of this Perspective, references 20 and 21 were omitted from the reference list and should have appeared as: 20. Adger, N. W., Barnett, J., Brown, K., Marshall, N. & O'Brien, K. Cultural dimension of climate change impacts and adaptation. Nature Clim. Change 3, 112–117 (2013). 21. Moser, S. C. & Ekstrom, J. A. A framework to diagnose barriers to climate change adaptation. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 104, 22026–22031 (2012). These omissions have been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the Perspective.
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Acknowledgements
The idea for this paper was conceived at a workshop jointly sponsored by the IGBP Global Land Project, and CSIRO. The work contributes to the EU FP7 project LUC4C (grant agreement no. 603542) and the Swedish Research Council Formas Strong Research Environment “Land use today and tomorrow”. A.A. acknowledges support from the Helmholtz Association, especially through its Initiative and Networking funds. M.R. and C.B. acknowledge funding by the European Union through the VOLANTE project (grant agreement no. 265104).
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Arneth, A., Brown, C. & Rounsevell, M. Global models of human decision-making for land-based mitigation and adaptation assessment. Nature Clim Change 4, 550–557 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2250
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2250
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