A MultiSector Dynamics (MSD) Framework to Assess Local Environmental Impacts from Land Use Changes Driven by Global and Regional Socio-Economic Forces

Land use allocation is determined by a variety of local and global drivers impacting agricultural markets. At same time, it determines several environmental outcomes, such as carbon storage, soil erosion, chemical use, hydrology, and water quality. We developed an interdisciplinary land system dynamics framework to project land use changes from multiple societal and economic drivers and its impacts on natural systems, assuring interoperability among and across various spatial scales. The framework couples a multi-sectoral and multi-regional socio-economic model of the world economy, the Economic Projections and Policy Analysis (EPPA), representing land use allocation driven by economic decisions, to an open-source downscaling land use model. EPPA considers costs of transition, land availability and demand for agricultural goods to determine land use allocation at the regional level, assuring consistency in the flow of goods and services, income and expenditure balances, and international trade. The Demeter downscaling model distributes the regional land use projections from EPPA into the grid level, considering prescribed rules to land use distributions, as well as the proportion of expansion that occurs within grids given existing land use types in each grid. The downscaling presents flexibility to add alternative rules for land cover spatial transition, such as crop suitability, conservation constraints, and climate risks. The downscaling model is then connected to a terrestrial system model (Community Terrestrial Systems Model - CTSM) integrating land, climate, weather and water dynamics, and allows projections on ecological and hydrological impacts. The framework translates regional projections of land use to a high-resolution representation of time-evolving land cover. We applied the framework to investigate socio-economic and environmental impacts from future land use scenarios in the U.S. under a global temperature stabilization effort and testing alternative assumptions about the role of bioenergy in such scenarios. We evaluate alternative bioenergy options, such as food crops in first generation biofuel technologies, grassy dedicated crops in second generation lignocellulosic biofuels, and woody crops related to bioelectricity with carbon capture and storage.