Developing an Agricultural Futures Framework to explore the option space for agricultural change in Europe under alternative value perspectives
2025
Diogo, Vasco | Williams, Tim G. | Debonne, Niels | Levers, Christian | Herzog, Felix | Bürgi, Matthias | Verburg, Peter H.
European agriculture must transform to confront the many challenges it faces, yet there are different sets of values that may underpin future agricultural change. However, we currently lack thorough understanding of the implications of operationalising these plural values for European land systems. In this article, we apply the IPBES Nature Futures Framework to develop a set of three land-change scenario narratives—the Agricultural Futures Framework (AFF)—representing the diverse ways that humans value agricultural land systems: Land for Food and Land for Nature, Land as Culture, and Land for Society. We operationalise the AFF scenarios in the CLUMondo land-change model and simulate how these alternative value perspectives could reshape land systems in Europe by 2050, accounting for future demands for food production, carbon sequestration, nature restoration, and nitrogen emission reduction. We find that significant land-system reconfiguration would be needed to fulfil these multiple demands under all three scenarios, ranging from 18.8% to 37.1% of all European land, with multiple scenarios showing multifunctional pathways in Eastern Romania and Bulgaria, productivist pathways in Poland and Slovakia, and marginalisation/rewilding pathways in Central France and Northern Spain. However, the magnitude and spatial locations of change differ substantially across the prioritised value perspectives, suggesting that these may have large implications for future agricultural development. The AFF framework and our findings are useful for identifying opportunities to reconcile the divisions in values perspectives, and to prioritise interventions for agri-food transformations.
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Bibliographic information
Publisher Springer Japan
ISSN 1862-4065 | 1862-4065This bibliographic record has been provided by Thünen-Institut
