Search

The Joint Research Centre of the European Commission has implemented the LUISA Territorial Modelling Platform for ex ante evaluation of European policies, measures and initiatives that might have a direct or indirect territorial impact. LUISA is based on the concept of ‘land function’ for cross-sector integration and for the representation of complex system dynamics. Beyond a traditional land use model, LUISA adopts a new approach towards activity-based modelling based upon the endogenous dynamic allocation of population, services and activities. The LUISA Platform consists of set of connected modules. A regional module is employed to regionalise (downscale) exogenous socio-economic projections and produce scenarios of regional development according to defined options of growth. An advanced module for the local distribution and allocation of Land Functions is based upon the dynamic interaction between population distribution, accessibility potential and the utility-based allocation of services. Feedbacks and spillover effects are included within and between the local and regional modules. LUISA outputs are represented in terms of ‘territorial indicators’ covering a wide range of themes, from economy to demography, to accessibility and transport to resource efficiency. The territorial indicators are routinely updated and distributed by online tool Urban Data Platform Plus of the Knowledge Centre for Territorial Policies.

A comprehensive assessment of European forest-based biomass harvest potentials, their future utilization and implications on international wood product markets and forest carbon dynamics requires the capability to model forest resource development as well as global markets for wood-based commodities with sufficient geographical and product detail and, most importantly, their interactions. To this aim, we apply a model framework fully integrating a European forest resource model and a global economic forest sector model. In a business-as-usual (BaU) scenario, European Union harvests increase seven percent by 2030 compared to past levels (485 million m3 on 2000-2012 average and 517 million m3 in 2030). The subsequent annual carbon stock change is a ten percent reduction by 2030 compared to 2000-2012 average (equal to 119.3 Tg C yr-1), corresponding to decreasing carbon-dioxide removal by the European forests. A second, high mobilization scenario (HM), characterized by the full utilization of the potential wood supply and a doubling of EU wood pellets consumption, was designed to explore potential impacts on forest carbon dynamics and international wood product markets under intensive exploitation of biomass resources. In the HM scenario, harvest increases by 55% (754 million m3 in 2030) compared to the BaU scenario. Fuelwood accounts for this increase in harvest levels as overall competition effects from increased wood pellets consumption outweighs synergies for material uses of wood, resulting in slightly reduced harvests of industrial roundwood. As expected, this increasing harvest level would significantly impair carbon-dioxide forest sequestration from the atmosphere in the medium term (-83% in 2030, compared to 2000-2012 average).

Appropriate land management can be an effective approach to improving water quantity regulation. There is, however, a need to identify both where measures are most needed and where they may be most effective. The water retention index (WRI) was developed with this goal in mind. The WRI is a composite indicator which takes into account parameters reflecting potential water retention in vegetation, water bodies, soil and underlying aquifers, as well as the influence of slope and artificially sealed areas. Three land management scenarios were simulated up to 2030 using the LUISA modeling platform: increasing grassland in upstream areas as well as afforestation in both upstream areas and riparian zones. The WRI was computed for all scenarios as well as a comparative “business†as†usual†baseline scenario. All scenarios showed an overall improvement of the index as compared to this baseline, with afforestation in upstream areas having the greatest effect. The WRI can provide useful insights into the current capacity of a landscape to regulate water as well as the effectiveness of possible remediation strategies applied at the European scale.

Land taken by artificial surfaces has an impact on the quality of life and ecosystems. To reduce possible negative impacts of land take, the European Commission proposed setting a milestone objecti...

The widely reported impacts of climate change on ecosystems and biodiversity pose a threat also to the supply of ecosystem services. Ecosystem services (ES) arise when ecological structures or functions contribute toward meeting a human demand. Global change is impacting biodiversity and ecosystems properties and is therefore likely to affect the supply of ES and, consequently, human well-being. Assessing the possible bio-physical impacts of the ongoing and future changes in climate is relevant for designing mitigation and adaptation policies. Yet undergoing a comprehensive climate impact assessment continues to be a demanding research challenge due to the large knowledge gaps, for instance on impact areas such as the consequences on ecosystem services. Here we present a preliminary assessment of the changes in ES supply as a function of projected changes in climate and land use / land cover (LULC). The assessment is carried out for the mainland of the 28 Member States (MS) of the European Union (EU-28). The focus of the analysis is on regulating ecosystem services, which are directly dependent on the proper functioning of ecosystems, they are not traded on markets so that their contribution to human well-being is more difficult to assess. We present an assessment of changes in ES supply for three regulating services: air quality regulation, soil erosion control, and water flow regulation. The assessment was carried out under the IPCC SRES A1B climate change scenario. Changes were expressed as a positive or negative percentage variation, relative to the present situation. Land conversion was found to have a much stronger impact on ES provision than climate change. When considering both climate change and LULC change the expected variation ranged between -100% and +100%. These results are explained by the key role that LULC plays in the delivery of regulating ES. The sensitivity of ES to climate change is smaller than that to LULC change, with variations ranging at the most between -27% and +27%. However, these changes are the most relevant to assess, for instance, potential economic impacts of climate change on the provision of ES. There are clearly major challenges to address within the area of climate-change impacts, yet the scale of global change requires prompt actions to mitigate or adapt to the new conditions. This work, therefore, represents perforce a preliminary spatially explicit assessment. Further research is needed not only to expand the analysis to other ES, but also to incorporate processes and scaling properties of the systems considered as they become available, and to account for spatial dependencies.

This paper presents a modelling approach for the spatial allocation of second-generation feedstock lignocellulosic crops under a reference policy scenario in European Union of 28 Member State EU-28. The land-use modelling platform LUMP was used in order to simulate the land-use changes from 2010 to 2050. Within the LUMP, the land demand for these lignocellulosic energy crops was derived from the Common Agricultural Policy Regionalised Impact analysis model. Suitability maps were generated for two main energy crop groups: herbaceous and woody lignocellulosic crops, using multicriteria analysis techniques. Biophysical factors climate, soil properties and topographical aspects, natural and artificial constraints and location-specific land categories were defined as relevant components within the platform. A sensitivity analysis determined the most influential factors to be temperature, precipitation, length of growing period and number of frost-free days. The results of the modelling exercise in the LUMP reflect the significant renewable energy contribution from energy crops in EU-28, which was estimated to be between 2.3 EJ/year in 2020 and 6.3 EJ/year in 2050, accounting for 2.3% and 9.6% of total energy consumption in the EU-28. The results of the allocation were aggregated at regional level to analyse trends. Regions with considerably high demand were identified in Germany, the United Kingdom and Poland.

Green infrastructure (GI), a network of nature, semi-natural areas and green space, delivers essential ecosystem services which underpin human well-being and quality of life. Maintaining ecosystem services through the development of GI is therefore increasingly recognized by policies as a strategy to cope with potentially changing conditions in the future. This paper assessed how current trends of land-use change have an impact on the aggregated provision of eight ecosystem services at the regional scale of the European Union, measured by the Total Ecosystem Services Index (TESI8). Moreover, the paper reports how further implementation of GI across Europe can help maintain ecosystem services at baseline levels. Current demographic, economic and agricultural trends, which affect land use, were derived from the so called Reference Scenario. This scenario is established by the European Commission to assess the impact of energy and climate policy up to 2050. Under the Reference Scenario, economic growth, coupled with the total population, stimulates increasing urban and industrial expansion. TESI8 is expected to decrease across Europe between 0 and 5 % by 2020 and between 10 and 15 % by 2050 relative to the base year 2010. Based on regression analysis, we estimated that every additional percent increase of the proportion of artificial land needs to be compensated with an increase of 2.2 % of land that qualifies as green infrastructure in order to maintain ecosystem services at 2010 levels.

Four unique pan-European CORINE Land Cover datasetsCLC1990, CLC2000, CLC2006, and CLC2012 and three datasets concerning changes between 1990 and 2012 have presented the first-ever opportunity to observe the European landscape by means of land cover and its change. This book brings together all these datasets to demonstrate the methods of identification, analysis and assessment of the European land cover and its changes that took place during the intervals of 19902000, 20002006, and 20062012. It provides examples in which CLC data plays a role in offering solutions to European environmental problems such as the monitoring of urban dynamics, land fragmentation, ecosystems mapping and assessment, and high nature value farmland characteristics. Existing environmental problems require new approaches, and European Landscape Dynamics: CORINE Land Cover Data indicates a set of outlooks for CLC data generation that produce more detailed levels of analysis and bottom-up approaches while addressing the relationship of CLC data to the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (INSPIRE). It also discusses the future of CLC data generation. A valuable resource of up-to-date information, it is useful to professionals such as scientists, territorial planners, and environmentalists as well as students of geosciences and all those who are interested in cognition of the European landscape, its changes and development.

Understanding uncertainties in land cover projections is critical to investigating land-based climate mitigation policies, assessing the potential of climate adaptation strategies, and quantifying the impacts of land cover change on the climate system. Here we identify and quantify uncertainties in global and European land cover projections over a diverse range of model types and scenarios, extending the analysis beyond the agro-economic models included in previous comparisons. The results from 75 simulations over 18 models are analysed and show a large range in land cover area projections, with the highest variability occurring in future cropland areas. We demonstrate systematic differences in land cover areas associated with the characteristics of the modelling approach, which is at least as great as the differences attributed to the scenario variations. The results lead us to conclude that a higher degree of uncertainty exists in land use projections than currently included in climate or earth system projections. To account for land use uncertainty, it is recommended to use a diverse set of models and approaches when assessing the potential impacts of land cover change on future climate. Additionally, further work is needed to better understand the assumptions driving land use model results and reveal the causes of uncertainty in more depth, to help reduce model uncertainty and improve the projections of land cover. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

In the last decade or so several studies have looked into the impacts of transport infrastructure improvements on decreasing territorial disparities. In those studies population levels are usually assumed static, although future population levels likely change in response to changing accessibility levels as well as to other factors. To test how much accessibility impacts may be affected by changes in population levels, this study explores the effects of foreseeable population changes on the accessibility improvements offered by large scale transport infrastructure investments. In this study we compare accessibility measures from four cases, namely the current situation; one case in which only transport investments are taken into account; and two cases that include transport investments and two scenarios with differing future population distributions that in turn are simulated by the LUISA land-use model. The modelled transport investments are assumed to improve travel times. The study concentrates on accessibility effects in Austria, Czech Republic, Germany and Poland. To provide a reference to the found results, the same computations are repeated with historical population and road network changes. The results indicate that differences in local population levels have a limited effect on average accessibility levels, but may have a large impact on territorial inequalities related to accessibility. The findings in this study underpin the importance of incorporating future local population levels when assessing the impacts of infrastructure investments on territorial disparities.

In this study a comprehensive analysis of the environmental impacts of 2 nd generation (lignocellulosic) feedstock using LUISA (Land Use Integrated Sustainability Assessment) spatial modelling platform has been performed under the Energy–Climate reference scenario in EU-28 from 2010 up to 2050. The definition of this reference scenario and its implementation in LUISA is described in this paper, emphasizing the role of the renewable energy directive in the promotion of renewable energies under sustainability criteria for the biomass production, including energy crops. These sustainability criteria attempt to minimize the potential negative impacts on environment, social and economic aspects. Accordingly, site selection is a crucial step, taking into account the ecological requirements of herbaceous and woody lignocellulosic crops for energy purpose. Geographical areas characterised by high suitability levels for the cultivation of energy crops were identified and mapped. A possible solution to land competition conflict is the use of degraded and potentially contaminated lands for growing energy lignocellulosic crops in those areas. The main output from

This paper details the process of integrating models to answer a specific policy-driven question: “What could be the impact of proposed Natural Water Retention Measures (NWRMs) on Europe’s Green Infrastructure (GI)?” It describes the new Land Use Modelling Platform (LUMP), now enabling a high spatial scale (100m) and large coverage (pan-European), whereby several sector-specific models contribute to assessing the impact of regional-level policy on a given spatial topic of concern. The configuration (land claims and land allocations modules) and calibration (accessibility and biophysical suitability) of the LUMP are explained. Four NWRM scenarios (riparian areas, afforestation, grassland and baseline scenario) are configured to run the simulations. For the reference year 2006, the spatial representation of GI is based on land use features of a refined version of the CORINE Land Cover, and resumed as connected components made of nodes and links. Mathematical morphological image processing and network graph theory model, available from the free software package GUIDOS, enabled the measurement of the GI connectivity and identified most critical links. Results show that the competition for land claimed by different economic sectors, combined with policy-driven rule-sets for the implementation of different Natural Water Retention Measures, yields very different results for the 2030 land use projections, and subsequently for the morphology of Green Infrastructure. Three indicators associated with the morphology of Green Infrastructure are computed in order to assess the model outputs for 2030. The indicators are computed to answer the following questions: 1) How is the quantity of Green Infrastructure affected by each of the NWRM, and what proportion of that Green Infrastructure is most valuable? 2) What is the location of the most critical nodes and connectors of Green Infrastructure, and what land use conversions occur under these? 3) Are the average components getting larger or smaller? Whereas the grassland measure results in the largest net increase of GI, the afforestation measure results in the overall largest number of hectares of key nodes and links within the network. Land conversions occur under the critical GI nodes and links; with a large increase in agricultural areas, especially for the riparian measure under critical nodes and the grassland measure under critical links. Also predominant is the swapping of land from pasture to forest under critical links with the afforestation measure. The riparian measure most increases the average size of GI components, and all three measures contribute to bridging two large components which were divided in the 2006 land use map, thus increasing the size of the largest component by more than 50%., JRC.H.8-Sustainability Assessment

Scenarios for potential shale gas development were modelled for the Baltic Basin in Northern Poland for the period 2015–2030 using the land allocation model EUCS100. The main aims were to assess the associated land use requirements, conflicts with existing land use, and the influence of legislation on the environmental impact. The factors involved in estimating the suitability for placement of shale gas well pads were analysed, as well as the potential land and water requirements to define 2 technology-based scenarios, representing the highest and lowest potential environmental impact. 2 different legislative frameworks (current and restrictive) were also assessed, to give 4 combined scenarios altogether. Land consumption and allocation patterns of well pads varied substantially according to the modelled scenario. Potential landscape fragmentation and conflicts with other land users depended mainly on development rate, well pad density, existing land-use patterns, and geology. Highly complex landscapes presented numerous barriers to drilling activities, restricting the potential development patterns. The land used for shale gas development could represent a significant percentage of overall land take within the shale play. The adoption of appropriate legislation, especially the protection of natural areas and water resources, is therefore essential to minimise the related environmental impact.