EXPLORING LAND-USE SCENARIOS, AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH BASED ON ACTUALLAND-USE

Land use scenarios should be able to describe land use as a result of changing biophysical and socioeconomic conditions, as well as the path ways of possible future developments including feedbacks between land use and its drivers. Several approaches exist, to date, to develop reg ional and national scenarios, (a) explorative biophysical studies whic h explore the biophysical boundaries of the 'solution space'; (b) soci oeconomic explorative studies which couple calculated biophysical pote ntials with elude socioeconomic estimates. An alternative approach, ba sed on actual and past land use and its biophysical and demographic dr ivers as integrated within the multi-scale land use change model CLUE, is presented and discussed. In combination with existing explorative approaches, this approach may contribute to More realistic land use pr ojection scenarios. (C) 1997 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.