Manuel Winograd

Land use modelling at the regional scale : an input to rural sustainability indicators for Central america

Abstract The monitoring of rural development and land use is a key requirement in order to produce information for policy-makers and planners and aid their understanding of development processes. Environmental and sustainability indicators, when combined with tools for their visualisation, manipulation and analysis are essential components of the monitoring process. By providing these information products and tools policy-makers can be given the opportunity to spatially interrogate the driving forces and the current state of rural development. However it is also vitally important for decision-makers to understand how trends will develop in the short-term future and the possible impacts of their decisions on the development process. This paper shows how the results of a spatially explicit land use model have been incorporated into a set of rural sustainability indicators to provide information to policy-makers in a form consistent with the information used in the monitoring process. The success of the monitoring process will depend not only on the availability of tools and indicators but also on the skills of the users and an institutional framework that fosters the application of these skills. Reliable and harmonised data are the key to obtaining useful results from the land use model chosen for this study, however responsibility for these data lies with the appropriate institutions in the countries of Central America. Demonstrating what can be done with ‘their’ data may provide these institutions with the necessary justification to overcome a lack of political will to invest in data collection, data use and the implementation of standards.

Modelling land-use change for Central America, with special reference to the impact of hurricane Mitch

Land-use systems are highly complex, and any modelling effort of land-use change should account for the complexity of the system. Furthermore, when the aim is to produce realistic scenarios, land-use models should be both spatially and temporally explicit. Using an example of such a model, the conversion of land-use and its effects modelling framework, we explore near-future land-use changes in Central America. Besides a Base and an Optimistic scenario, which assumes yields to approach the present maximum in the region and assumes export and import to increase, focus is on projection of the long-term effects of an extreme event. Scenario assumptions are based on actual data that became available after hurricane Mitch struck the continent. Resulting maps of the Base and Optimistic scenario demonstrate how slow and gradual changes at the national level translate into highly dynamic patterns of land-use change when allocated spatially. Hot-spots of change prove relatively insensitive to changes in income. Particularly land-use change patterns of the most common land-use types, pasture, annual crops, and natural vegetation, differed between both scenarios. The results of the Natural Hazard scenario for Honduras separately as well as for Central America as a whole clearly indicate that the effects of a hurricane on land-use patterns, though initially strong, are likely to largely disappear within a period of 10 years. Concepts from ecology regarding complexity as developed by Holling are used to illustrate the behaviour of the Central American land-use system. Practicabilities for policy makers are indicated, but similar studies and spatially explicit models are needed from sociology and economics to complete our understanding of the long-term effects of an extreme event.

Dynamics of the agricultural frontier in the Amazon and savannas of Brazil: analyzing the impact of policy and technology

While many government policies stimulating deforestation have been reversed, private sector lobbies for uncontrolled logging and soybean export corridors threaten the Amazon. Under a favorable scenario (macroeconomic stabilization, controlled logging and road building, sustainable technologies, global environmental markets) reconversion of natural habitat could be 30% lower than under unfavorable policies and technologies, without sacrificing production.