The Global Land Programme’s 5th Open Science Meeting (Pathways to Sustainable and Just Land Systems) - Oaxaca, Mexico, November 2024 - has now opened its call for papers: https://event.fourwaves.com/osm2024
Of particular interest to COMSES Net, please consider submitting your abstract to session 205R - Behavioural Land System Models for Imagining and Evaluating Alternative Futures:
Organizer(s): James Millington, Calum Brown, Derek Robinson
Advances in the behavioural sciences and simulation modelling have stimulated growth in the use of alternatives to econometric and equilibrium-based models for investigating and understanding sustainable land system futures. These behavioural land systems models provide rich representations of human behaviour and institutional processes that enable us to imagine and evaluate possible alternative futures in diverse ways. Such alternative approaches include agent-based modelling, system dynamics models and Bayesian belief networks (among others) and allow exploration of adaptations of actors, feedbacks between actors and their environments, and impacts of specific policy decisions. Thus, behavioural models enable us to explore the constraints that behavioural, socio-economic, cultural and political realities place on achieving desired land-use policies, such as carbon dioxide removal and net-zero targets for climate change mitigation or habitat restoration and conservation for biodiversity.
This session will bring together land system scientists to share and compare recent applications of behavioural models of land systems, including experiences of stakeholder engagement in the modelling process. Discussion will allow participants to explore directions for future advances and ongoing challenges to using and developing these tools. This discussion may include considering approaches to represent drivers of human behaviour (e.g. motivations or incentives, whether from social, market or regulatory sources), the importance of land manager and other stakeholder beliefs about how drivers will play out in future (i.e. anticipatory behaviour), and the effects of varying visions for land systems between communities and generations (e.g. farm succession). The session is linked to the BeModeLS GLP working group but welcomes participants from across the GLP community to explore the diversity of ways in which human behaviour can and needs to be represented in simulation models of land systems to imagine alternative futures, evaluate which futures are most likely to become prominent, and identify pathways to realizing desired outcomes.
James Millington, PhD FRGS
Dept. of Geography, King’s College London