Abstract
The uncertain effects of climatic change and changing demands for ecosystem services on the distribution of forests and their levels of service provision require assessments of future land-use change, ecosystem service provision, and how ecosystem service demands may be met. We present CRAFTY-Sweden, an agent-based, land-use model that incorporates land owner behaviour and decision-making in modelling future ecosystem service provision in the Swedish forestry sector. Future changes were simulated under scenarios of socio-economic and climatic change between 2010 and 2100. The simulations indicate that the influence of climatic change (on land productivities) may be less important than that of socio-economic change or behavioural differences. Simulations further demonstrate that the variability in land owner and societal behaviour has a substantial role in determining the direction and impact of land-use change. The results indicate a sizeable increase in timber harvesting in coming decades, which together with a substantial decoupling between supply and demand for forest ecosystem services highlights the challenge of continuously meeting demands for ecosystem services over long periods of time. There is a clear need for model applications of this kind to better understand the variation in ecosystem service provision in the forestry sector, and other associated land-use changes.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 174-208 |
Number of pages | 35 |
Journal | Ecosystem Services |
Volume | 23 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2017 Feb 1 |
Subject classification (UKÄ)
- Forest Science
- Environmental Sciences related to Agriculture and Land-use
Free keywords
- Agent-based modelling
- Behaviour
- Ecosystem services supply and demand
- Forestry sector
- Scenario analysis