ABSTRACT
How climatic changes might affect land cover is one of the overarching questions of the land-use and land-cover change (LUCC) project-a core project of the international geosphere-biosphere programme (IGBP) and the international human dimensions programme on global environmental change (IHDP). Land-cover dynamics and its diagnostic models are one of LUCC’s main focuses (https://www.geo.ucl.ac.be/LUCC/lucc.html). Various models for simulating land-cover scenarios have been developed. For instance, the published Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES), landcover scenario assumes that in any one of the four major SRES regions in the world, changes occur everywhere at the same rate; this includes changes in cropland, grassland, forest, and energy biomass crop production. Land-cover changes under A1, B1, and B2 marker scenarios are highly uncertain. The A2 marker scenario does not include land-cover change, and so changes under the A1 scenario are assumed to also apply to A2. The SRES land-cover scenarios do not include the effect of climate change on future land cover (Arnell et al., 2004). SRES A2 and B2 scenarios of IPCC were downscaled in a pro babilistic cellular automata model (PCAM) to define the narrative scenario conditions of future urban land-use change. The results of the modeling experiments illustrate the spectrum of possible land-cover scenarios of the New York Metropolitan Region for the years 2020 and 2050 (Solecki and Oliveri, 2004).
