RQ3 highlights the need to better understand how land use might respond to climate change, how the resilience of systems can be enhanced and the degree to which there will be the need to adapt to climate change that is already entrained or the indirect consequences of changes elsewhere. Such changes are doubly significant – first as they may undermined the capacity of Scotland land to deliver provisioning and other ecosystem services but perhaps more significantly, any positive feedback on emissions will undermine efforts to mitigate climate change. The WP will conduct damage screening (spatio-temporal mapping) of climate change impacts across agricultural, forestry and peatland systems (linking with topics C5, D3 and D5). The WP will also assess the consequences of climate change for resilience, looking at a range of ecosystem functions across scales, linking field/parcel and business-scale analyses with assessments of multifunctionality at landscape scales. These specific analyses will be shaped by higher-level analysis that contextualises land use change scenarios by linking the Shared Socio-Economic Pathways developed for the UNFCCC[2] and UK regionalisation initiatives from the UKCEH-SPEED project. This tests how these assumptions (e.g., on indirect drivers of land use change) might play out in space across Scotland (using the APoLUS model) and assess their outcomes (with C3.1).
