The multiplescale land use change model LandShift: a scenario analysis of land use change and environmental consequences in Africa.

The multiplescale land use change model LandShift: a scenario analysis of land use change and environmental consequences in Africa.

Land use and land cover change are considered as important drivers and targets of global environmental change. In this paper we present the integrated model system LandShift to simulate land use change processes and related consequences for the environment on the global and continental level. LandShift has a modular structure that allows the integration of various functional model components. The first version of the model system includes a newly developed land use change module and modules for crop and grassland productivity, which are based on the ecosystem model DayCent. Furthermore, LandShift is linked to the global hydrological model WaterGAP2 that delivers information on water-availability and water-stress. The use of these dynamic models allows for simulating climate change effects on hydrological and bio-geochemical processes. LandShift operates on a multi-level scale-hierarchy. On country level (macro-level) exogenous model drivers are specified, including demands for agricultural commodities and for services like housing. The land use change module regionalizes these demands to a grid with a spatial resolution of 5 arc-minutes (micro-level). It is structured in three sub-modules dealing with the land use sectors “settlement and industrial” (METRO) and agriculture (AGRO, GRASS). Simulation results are presented from a pre-study for the African continent based on a Millennium Ecosystem Assessment scenario.