Current status and key questions in Landscape Decision making

Created:	2019-07-03 14:43
Institution:	Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences
Description:	Workshop Theme Land is a key limiting resource in many regions of the world, including the UK. Society depends on land resources for many purposes, including urban settlement, employment and transportation, as well as a host of benefits we get from nature (ecosystem services) - food, timber, energy, recreation, and aesthetic benefits. We require these land resources to be resilient to environmental change, and to meet increasing demands for not only housing, but also renewable energy, recreation and climate change mitigation. Land-use therefore connects many of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. In the UK, EU exit will require the introduction of many new policies connected to land-use (e.g. replacing the Common Agricultural Policy, the EU Biodiversity Strategy, etc) – implying an urgent need to develop better landscape decision tools. The one-month INI programme explores the mathematical and statistical challenges associated with making use of the latest observations to understand and project land-use changes. Questions to be addressed will include: what is the minimal useful representation of the landscape system? How do we robustly model the coupled human-environment system without assuming that people act as perfectly rational economic agents? Where are the non-linearities and sensitivities of the system, and how could these be used to produce transformative changes in land-use? How do we reconcile scale disconnects between different elements of human-environment systems? This three-day workshop will open the INI research programme, focusing on reviewing the state-of-the-art in modelling land systems and identifying key knowledge gaps where collaboration between different environmental, mathematical and social science disciplines may lead to new insights, methods and tools. The first day of the workshop will be open to stakeholders to set the scene on current decision-making approaches and to define policy-relevant areas where advances in the state-of-the-art would be particularly valuable. Participants in the workshop will include a highly interdisciplinary mix of both academic and non-academic researchers and stakeholders working on land-related research and policy questions. These will include (but not be limited to) participants interested in agriculture, forestry, water resources and biodiversity, as well as mathematicians, statisticians and computer scientists expert in system modelling, uncertainty quantification and decision making who are also interested in these wide ranging applied questions. The workshop programme will be available soon. Days 2 and 3 of the workshop will consist of both talks and panel discussions covering the following topics: "Decision-making in the face of uncertainty" Modelling social/human processes in landscapes Model coupling Spatial/temporal scaling Non-linearities and tipping points Benchmarking, calibration and uncertainty (including the role of model emulation)