LUsTT, Land Use Today and Tomorrow.

Recent drastic price increases for a wide range of staple foods (particularly cereals) have demonstrated that the multiple demands on land services begin to outweigh the supply. The current surge for biofuels, seen as an important instrument to reduce fossil fuel burning, is regarded as one of the possible causes: biofuel production is directly competing for agricultural area used for food production.

Policies that support sustainable land use for future generations must therefore include a differentiated assessment of the total societal and environmental impacts of biofuel production, but also account for other human demands that contest for services provided by the land (conservation, urbanisation, clean water).

What is more, land degradation and climate change constrain the potential to increase or even maintain current levels of productivity and the discrepancy between supply and demand of land services may become even more critical in future.

LUsTT aims to identify the possible pathways towards sustainable land use, based on integrating these multiple dimensions. Using a novel, coupled socioeconomic scenario-ecosystem model framework, LUsTT will study the multiple natural and societal factors that determine land use as a basis for describing alternative plausible land use futures, their associated risks to society and ecosystems, and feasible pathways to the sustainable use of land, human and natural resources as input to the national and global policy process.

Researchers involved are from:

• Lund University, Division of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Analysis
• Lund University, Centre for Sustainability Studies
• Edinburgh Centre for the study of Environmental Change and Sustainability (CECS), of Edinburgh.

Its specific tasks and goals are:

• An advanced analysis of supply (biophysics, biogeochemistry: LPJ-GUESS) vs. demand (PLUM), based on socioeconomic and environmental constraints
• A formalised uncertainty analysis based on conditional probabilistic futures
• To consider broad range of trade-offs (complete GHG balance, C-sink, water, habitat diversity…)
• To identify possible pathways (including normative approaches) to achieve emerging EU/national policies
• To contribute to establishment of sustainability standards for bioenergy.

For more information about LUsTT, contact Almut Arneth, or download our flyer.