Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
8.2.2 Scenario Development
Scenario analysis of land use change and dynamic prediction involves many
driving factors that affect land use change, which has always been the attention of
academia worldwide. Through simulating regional land use change under different
scenarios, rational forecasting and evaluation of future land use could be made,
which will offer scientific reference for sustainable land use planning and man-
agement at regional and national scale.
Climate scenarios are plausible representations of future climate conditions,
which can be produced using a variety of approaches, and among which, regional
climate models are increasingly popular (Moss et al.
2010
). There is a notable
increase in interest in regional-scale climate scenarios and projection methods,
especially for impact and adaptation assessment (Solomon et al.
2007
).
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been working on
the scenarios of potential future anthropogenic climate change, the underlying
driving forces, and the response options. According to IPCC (Kriegler et al.
2010
;
Nakicenovic et al.
2000
), socioeconomic scenarios consist of qualitative narrative
descriptions of future trends and quantitative assumptions (also called the story-
line) about key socioeconomic variables, and could facilitate the exploration of
long-term consequences of anthropogenic climate change and available response
options. A reliable database and an appropriate method shall be adopted to
facilitate the study of land use impact on surface climate, and the scenario analysis
can be adopted to perform macrostructure change. In the study of Xu et al. (
2013
),
three kinds of scenarios were designed based on the socioeconomic development.
They simulated land use trends under three different scenarios including baseline
scenario and two control scenarios (risk scenario and rapid development mode
transformation scenario), and obtained the most suitable scenario to control CO
2
emissions of the three scenarios. Their scenarios excel other scenarios as they
compile the IPCC scenarios with the specific situation in the research area. With
the scenario analysis, it is possible to provide a theoretical basis for the future land
use planning in mitigating the impact of climate change. As the first attempt of
systematic analysis of LUCC scenarios and with the dataset produced by their
study, their research laid a good foundation for relevant researches.
8.3 Case Studies of Land Use Impacts on Surface Climate
With an improved database and model base, climate model shall be introduced in
order to apply this simulation platform to study land use impact on surface climate.
Climate change in China has been simulated in recent years by many scholars. The
representative methods include Gao et al. simulated climate change in China using
the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) Regional
Climate Model version 3 (RegCM3) (Gao et al.
2012
). The RegCM3 can reproduce
