Land use change: assessing the net climate forcing, and options for climate change mitigation and adaptation (LUC4C)

Description:

Climate change and land-use change are essential environmental challenges to society that are strictly linked.  

In addition to the direct impacts of climate change on ecosystems, management practices for climate change adaptation or mitigation also affect the supply of ecosystem services, and impact on other important societal goals. The interplay between land use and climate change is therefore fundamental in understanding land-based climate mitigation options and how societies will adapt to climate change in the future. LUC4C aims to provide progress towards quantitative understanding of impacts and feedbacks in the coupled human-land-climate system, and the role people play.

The LUC4C project aims to increase the knowledge of the climate change - land use change interactions, by improving and evaluating a suite of modelling approaches at different levels of integration and complexity, and to develop a framework for the synthesis of complex earth system science into a portfolio of the best practical guidelines for policy and societal stakeholders, for the identification of trade-offs, benefits or adverse effects of land-based mitigation policy options across different scenarios. 

The specific objectives of the project are (i) the enhancement of our ability to understand the societal and environmental drivers of land use and land cover change (LULCC) relevant to climate change; (ii) the assessment of regional and global effects of different mitigation policies and adaptation measures within alternative socio-economic contexts; (iii) the quantification of how the LULCC-climate change interplay affects regional vs. global, and biophysical vs. biogeochemical ecosystem-atmosphere exchange, and how the relative magnitude of these interactions varies through time; (iv) the advancement of our ability to represent LULCC in climate models; and (v) the assessment of LULCC-climate effects on multiple land ecosystem services and the analyses of these in relation to other societal needs that provide either a synergy or trade-off to climate mitigation and adaptation.

Project information

Lead

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Garmish, Germany

Partners

1. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Institute of Meteorology and Climate/Atmospheric Environmental Research (KIT)

2. University of Exeter (UNEXE)

3. Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)

4. UK Met Office (UKMET)

5. University of Edinburgh (UEDIN)

6. Stichting VU-VUMC (Institute for Environmental Studies, VU University Amsterdam; IVM-VU)

7. Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)

8. Netherlands Environmental Agency (PBL)

9. Joint Research Centre (JRC)

10. Centro Euro-Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici (CMCC)

11. denkstatt (DENK)

12. Russian State Agrarian University (RSAU-MTAA)

13. National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)

14. University of Capetown

15. Peking University (PKU)

Source of funding

European Commission - FP7; Total cost: EUR 8005363,33; EU contribution: EUR 5999079