Integrated models and scenarios of climate, land use and common birds dynamics
Modélisation intégrée des usages des sols, du climat et de la biodiversité
Abstract
Reconciling food, fiber and energy production with biodiversity conservation is among the greatest challenges of the century, especially in the face of climate change. Model-based scenarios linking climate, land use and biodiversity can be useful tools for decision support in that perspective. Here we present a modeling framework that links climate projections, private land use decisions (farming, forest and urban uses) and the abundances of common birds as an indicator of biodiversity. One of the major originalities is to integrate the effect of regionalized projections of climate change (IPCC SRES A1B) on the economic drivers of land use using fine-scale data from France. In addition, incentive-compatible conservation policies are simulated and compared to others scenarios in terms of land use and biodiversity over the next four decades. Our analysis indicates that the effect of climate dominates the effects of land use and conservation policy on bird abundances at the aggregate scale. Moreover, these global environmental changes turn out to be globally detrimental for biodiversity. Only a moderate number of bird species and locations appear to profit from habitat-based conservation.