2nd Periodic Report D0.3b. PRIMA collaborative project, EU 7th Framework Programme, contract n° 212345 | PRIMA, second rapport périodique

[Departement_IRSTEA]Territoires [TR1_IRSTEA]DTAM

English. Facing structural change, European rural areas still fulfil multiple social, economic and ecological functions. Because of scale interplays and sustainability trade-offs, their future dynamics are still difficult to ascertain. In addition to the inherent difficulties of this undertaking, challenges in actual assessments also depend on external shocks to the economy at large or to particular regions, along with spillover effects among neighbouring regions. PRIMA proposes to improve knowledge in scaling down this assessment. It focuses on agriculture, forestry, tourism, and ecosystem services, with special attention to the structural effects of the European policies at municipality levels. The six case studies of PRIMA, conducted in Germany, United Kingdom, France, Croatia, Czech Republic, and Bulgaria, are important for two main reasons: They provide test cases for the PRIMA approaches, and they have influenced the development of the PRIMA approaches. These case studies have been chosen for their variety of rural dynamics and governance organisation. The strategic and planning documents in these study areas highlights that many measures are targeted to several pillars of sustainable development, even though multifunctionality concept is often not directly addressed. Because of the bottom-up governance of the European cohesion policy, a large variety of priorities and measures has been observed in the priorities and measures, targeted to several pillars of sustainable development. This variety has been narrowed in a pre-modelling stage, where 2 groups of stakeholders were interviewed: Those who can assist in scenario and model development (coming from the institutions which implement policy), and the actors who may be affected by the policy and hence those related behavioural changes should be captured by the model framework. A conceptual model has then been developed from extensive literature review and information collected during the surveys. This model focuses on the population dynamics in rural municipalities and on the decision making behaviours observed. The conceptual micro-simulation model was successfully adapted to three of the study regions (France, United Kingdom and Germany). Additionally, the developed agent-based model was adapted for the United Kingdom region; this allowed studying the effects of social aspects that are not captured in the micro-simulation model. A strong effort was made to adapt the models to the remaining regions (Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Croatia) but the lack of sufficient data would have made the adaptations unstable in the sense that small changes in policy could lead to unexpectedly large changes on key behavioural aspects. For validation purposes, a series of workshops were conducted on the case study areas. The orientation of these workshops depended on the availability of the models for the given case study area. The workshops promoted stakeholder learning about modelling. On the whole, participants recognised models as simplifications of reality. They found explanations about the model components comprehensible, and reacted fairly favourably to the idea of having such a decision-support tool available. However, the lack of good data Contract no. 212345 | Deliverable no. | 07/01/2012 Periodic Report 10/85 at a low geographical scale in most case study areas was seen as a severe limitation. Beyond pathways for model revision, stakeholder on-model involvement in PRIMA’s workshops identified some methodological advances in the field of participatory modelling have been identified. Among these is making explicit the role of a model broker, the endorsement of which should improve the various interpretations of participants. Scenario development, though far in advance of their technical skills, has also proved an efficient tool to involve stakeholders in challenging a model. Adaptation of these models to local conditions revealed their limitations and scope. Further conceptual work was identified and undertaken concerning the design of methods to reconstruct commuting network for regions where data was unavailable, to, to calibrate models with several number of variables and of new approaches to dynamically derive services jobs availability. PRIMA also developed a conceptual work and an integrated simulation tool that includes the MAGNET (formerly LEITAP) model for downscaling from world level to the country level, and a downscaling tool from country level towards the NUTS2 level. An interface has been developed for easy downscaling of scenarios. Special attention has been paid to procedures to process data from EUROSTAT towards a database useful as input for the downscaling model. Last, we progressed towards recommendations enhancing the scope of IA methods, with a review of literature and extensive work between all workpackages.